BitLocker is Microsoft’s easy-to-use, proprietary encryption program for Windows that can encrypt your entire drive as well as help protect against unauthorized changes to your system such as firmware-level malware.

BitLocker is available to anyone who has a machine running Windows Vista or 7 Ultimate, Windows Vista or 7 Enterprise, Windows 8.1 Pro, Windows 8.1 Enterprise, or Windows 10 Pro. If you’re running an Enterprise edition, chances are your PC belongs to a large company, so you must discuss enabling BitLocker encryption with your company’s IT department.

When you store sensitive data on your computer, it’s crucial that you take the necessary steps to protect that data (especially if you use a laptop or tablet).

This is not just to stop people from accessing your files, but it’s more about preventing your private data from falling into the wrong hands if you lose your device, or it gets stolen.

One way you can protect your data is by using encryption. Briefly, encryption is basically the process of making any type of data unreadable by anyone without proper authorisation. If you use encryption to scramble your data, it will continue to be unreadable even after sharing it with other people. In other words, only you with the right encryption key can make the data readable again.