Opal is among the latest efforts to satisfy the growing corporate demand for disk encryption. According to Forrester's of 942 IT and security managers in North America and Europe,  full-disk encryption was cited as the top client security technology to be piloted or adopted this year.

Encryption is fast becoming a necessity for both stored data and in transit.

In some industry sectors, particularly healthcare, both in the United States and abroad, encryption has become a necessity to satisfy regulatory requirements.

"The Department of Health requires that no patient data be sent unless it's encrypted," explains Saeed Umar, the IT project manager at based in London.

The hospital system, which provides healthcare to hundreds of thousands of individuals and educates medical students from the University of Manchester and the University of St. Andrews, has a staff of 6,500 and about 4,000 PCs.