Microsoft IT Solutions: Full Drive Encryption using BitLocker
One of the challenges that I have been focusing my team on this fiscal year has been creating new solutions that leverage the learning that Microsoft IT has had in deploying technology or solving problems. Microsoft IT generally has to deploy new technologies from Microsoft several months before they are generally available for general release in a process known as dogfooding. Often it needs to develop and deploy solutions multiple times as the product cycles through from betas to release candidates to the released version. Customers will find solutions that will leverage this deep expertise and experience useful in speeding up the architecture & deployments of their solutions.
In this series Microsoft IT Solutions, I will be detailing some of this innovation coming out of Microsoft’s InfoSec group. The first of the series is Full Drive Encryption using BitLocker®. I asked Richard Lewis, Security Architect on my team & the creator of this solution kit to describe the BitLocker FDE solution. Here is his description:
The InfoSec team recently created and delivered the BitLocker Service Kit for the Core I/O Service Line under the Security, Identity and Access Management (SIAM) portfolio. SIAM is a portfolio offering from Microsoft Services. SIAM is divided into six offerings that address particular security IT capabilities – the BitLocker Service Kit was created under the Enterprise Data Security Optimization IT capability.
The BitLocker Service Kit provides Microsoft Services sales and delivery roles with the resources they need to sell and deliver comprehensive Full Volume Encryption solutions based on Windows Bitlocker Drive Encryption. Ultimately this Service Kit helps Microsoft Services accelerate their customer’s BitLocker deployment timeline and therefore Windows Vista deployment, decrease the risk of data loss, and increase customer satisfaction. Overall this kit contains over twenty different documents such as checklists, guides, worksheets, operation guides, architecture and design documents to help our sales and delivery consultants to deploy BitLocker in an optimized manner.
The resource who led creation of this service kit was also involved in the MSIT BitLocker deployment and is currently helping a large financial services organization deploy BitLocker to over 100,000+ desktops. Learning and feedback from the MSIT internal BitLocker deployment were instrumental in creation of this Service Kit and will continue to be used as InfoSec goes in the field and helps Microsoft customers with their BitLocker deployments. This kit demonstrates that IP from MSIT projects add value to our products & ultimately our customers.
Drop me a note if you would like some additional details on this solution kit or the innovation process within Microsoft.
- Akshay
