At long last, McAfee is catching up with its competitors in the security space in the field of data encryption, with the rollout yesterday of a new feature that the company appears to have acquired last November.

McAfee's Total Protection for Data, rolled out on Monday, includes encryption technology obtained through McAfee's recent buyout of SafeBoot. In announcing the $350 million acquisition last October, McAfee made its intentions on that score quite clear.

After all, the SafeBoot Data Protection Suite was designed for encrypting both the whole local hard drive and individual files and folders.

So now, it shouldn't be all that surprising that Total Protection for Data Protection will do much the same, together with some augmentation by other data loss prevention technologies from McAfee.

On its own site, McAfee now lists capabilities for Total Protection for Data that include two-factor preboot authentication -- supporting smart cards and USB tokens -- along with the use of algorithms such as RC5-1024 and AES-256 for achieving strong encryption, for instance.

Meanwhile, until its recent incorporation under the umbrella of McAfee's Web site, SafeBoot's Web site mentioned the same two strong encryption algorithms, along with two-factor pre-boot authentication, explaining that this variety of encryption "requires users to both 'know something' and 'have something' before devices are allowed to start."

At this writing, it's still possible to find cached versions of the old SafeBoot site that contains these words if you look hard enough using a search engine -- although that opportunity probably won't last very too long.

In any event, during the buyout last fall, some industry observers questioned whether the deal was worth the $350 million price tag paid by McAfee.

Maybe or maybe not. But along with the advanced encryption technologies now incorporated into its 'Total Protection for Data' software, McAfee has also gained access to SafeBoot's customer base of 4,200 organizations, which includes 150 corporations in the Fortune 500 category.