"We're covered," he said. "It would be worth it if it cost four times as much. We like it for the control it gives us over the end-user environment, extending to situations when the machine is not in our physical control," he added.

And being covered is the main reason more and more enterprises are adopting (aside from tracking) some form of encryption, said Eric Maiwald, analyst at Burton Group, a research and advisory firm in Midvale, Utah. More laws, such as California's SB 1386, require notification of victims if a company suffers a breach of unencrypted personal data.

"They want that encryption 'Get out of jail free' card," Maiwald said. "Encryption products have been around since the 1980s but have not seen much adoption outside the government and financial institutions, but now with the notification laws, we are seeing much larger deployments," Maiwald added. He noted that there are dozens of such products, falling into either file encryption or whole-disk encryption categories.

But Maiwald advised against depending on the encryption facilities built directly into some applications, such as Microsoft Word. "There are a lot of programs out there that will break them," he warned.

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