Patented DiskAgent Technology Transitioned to DriveStrike
With DiskAgent, Spearstone introduced lock, locate, and wipe in 2006. Those three actions became a pillar of data security that brands such as Apple would later offer their users.
DiskAgent was Spearstone’s first product built as software as a service: continuous online backup, remote wipe, and recovery for the computers and phones a business could not afford to lose.
That work continues as DriveStrike, a cross-platform dashboard to lock, locate, and wipe the devices an organization relies on. We look forward to serving you at drivestrike.com.
Salt Lake City, 2004
Spearstone’s first product for the service era
Spearstone was established in 2004 in Salt Lake City as a software products company. Before DiskAgent, the firm built custom applications for customers including Wells Fargo, iTV, Pearson Learning, and Mountain America Credit Union, along with products such as Matrix 2.0 and BAKERMAKS.
DiskAgent was the first of those efforts designed for software as a service, and it was aimed at the organizations least likely to run a data center of their own: small and mid-sized businesses, home offices, and individuals. The line on the product was simple. Complete data protection for you and your business.
The service protected business-critical files and confidential customer records from hardware failure, natural disaster, and theft, through automated online backup, remote data wipe, and PC recovery. It was built to be administered from one place, including by resellers who wanted to offer it under their own name.
Continuous backup
The agent watched the folders and file types an administrator required, encrypted each change, and uploaded it through corporate proxies and firewalls. Restores could come from the moment of failure or from an earlier point in time, including from a web browser at a client site or an airport.
Locate and wipe
If a PC went missing, DiskAgent recorded location information the next time that machine reached the internet and could help file the police report. Wipe levels were chosen by the customer: an electronic shred, deletion of the backup, or disabling the operating system and boot sector.
Phones, too
DiskAgent Mobile extended the same idea to the phones people were already carrying into client work: BlackBerry, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and later the iPhone. A lost phone could be locked, wiped of resident data, and cleared of what sat on the SIM or SD card.
Why it existed
The risk DiskAgent was built to answer
The briefings Spearstone took to customers in that period described a blunt problem. Industry figures the company cited then — from the FBI and the Computer Security Institute, Gartner, IDC, Safeware, and others — said about 2,000 laptops were lost or stolen every day, and that 97 percent of stolen laptops were never recovered. One in five computers was said to suffer a fatal disk crash. Forty percent of small and mid-sized businesses were not backing up at all, and a large share of the backups that did run could not be fully restored.
A Ponemon Institute study quoted in DiskAgent’s accounting brochure put the average cost of a lost or stolen corporate laptop at $49,246, once replacement, forensics, lost work, and legal exposure were counted. The brochures for CPAs and for Sarbanes-Oxley both carried a harder line still: studies then showed that more than 75 percent of businesses that suffered a significant data loss went out of business within a year.
Those numbers belong to the years DiskAgent was introduced. They are why the product was built the way it was: always on, offsite, encrypted, and able to reach a machine after it had already left the building.
One console for backup, retention, and a missing machine
DiskAgent ran in the background and used little of the PC. An administrator set the file types and folders that had to be protected, and the ones that must not be. Every version could be kept for a retention period the company chose, then deleted when that period ended. Two people could be required before a backup set was changed or a copy was destroyed for good. Bandwidth and CPU could be throttled when someone was working, and backups could be paused for a flight or a thin connection.
- The agent monitored the files and folders you specified. Changes were encrypted and sent to the DiskAgent server farm.
- Copies were stored redundantly in controlled-access data centers, in more than one location, so a single site or a single region was not the whole archive.
- People could reach their files from any internet connection, and a missing PC or phone could be located and wiped from the same account.
Encryption was described as AES, at a level the materials compared with Department of Defense practice. Backups at rest used 256-bit AES. Copies in transit used 256-bit SSL. Healthcare materials mapped the service to HIPAA expectations for retrievable copies of electronic protected health information, a contingency plan for fire, vandalism, system failure, and natural disaster, and technical measures against unauthorized access. Sarbanes-Oxley materials mapped it to document retention: an administrator set the rule, DiskAgent kept every version for the required period, and the same rule could cover email traffic, not only the messages an employee remembered to save.
The handoff
DriveStrike takes the same idea further
Information stopped being only an advantage. It became a vulnerability that traveled with every laptop and phone that left the office. DiskAgent had already proven that lock, locate, and wipe belonged in the product, not in a checklist someone hoped to follow after a theft.
The device mix then outgrew a Windows PC and a handful of early smartphones. Organizations needed one place to reach the machines they actually issued. DriveStrike is that place: a cross-platform dashboard to lock, locate, and wipe Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and ChromeOS devices, with encryption for the data those machines carry.
DiskAgent’s technology moved there. The service you knew — find the device, keep the data, and wipe it when the device is gone — is what DriveStrike continues.
From the archive
Two spots from the DiskAgent years
These short films are how DiskAgent explained the same problem to customers: a laptop that walks away, and a phone that does the same.
Figures above are the ones printed in DiskAgent’s own briefings and brochures from the period, including sources those decks listed (FBI / Computer Security Institute, Gartner, IDC, Safeware, the Ponemon Institute, and others). They describe the risk DiskAgent was introduced to meet. They are not a current claim about theft or failure rates.