Data protection company PGP says that increased usage of the Mac platform has prompted it to deliver a port of its pre-boot authentication scheme for those users.

PGP cited analyst data that shows a marked increase in enterprise adoption of Apple systems. Long a sector where the Cupertino company has struggled, support from a software maker like PGP certainly goes a long way.

Forrester says that enterprise Mac adoption tripled last year to 4.2% of the market. Additionally, a study from Yankee group indicates that nearly nine out of every ten companies now have Macs in their IT deployments, up from 48% two years ago.

This poses a problem for IT managers concerned about security. With data shared throughout the network, administrators need a solution ensuring that data remains secure regardless of the operating system.

"The challenge for the enterprise has been straddling the desire for the ease- of-use and array of applications that the Mac provides, with the lack of data security solutions available," Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst John Oltsik explains.

Enter PGP Whole Disk Encryption version 9.9. With this release, the pre-boot authentication scheme for PGP is available to users of either Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" or 10.5 "Leopard."

Pre-boot authentication is a process that side-steps the loading of the operating system, in which the user must authenticate himself before the boot process actually begins. Nothing can be read or written to the hard disk until this operation is complete.

If data is lost or stolen, PGP's solution allows for the remote lockdown of entire contents of a laptop, desktop, external drive, or USB flash drive, including boot sectors, system, and swap files. In addition, the release can be used with the company's Universal Server application to manage policies, users, and configurations, the company said.

Whole Disk Encryption is not the first product from PGP for the Mac platform. PGP has also released e-mail and file management applications for OS X.

PGP expects Whole Disk Encryption for Mac to be released in July.