You can't be too careful. As Steganos is keen to point out in the accompanying blurb to Safe Professional 2007, while replacing stolen computer equipment is usually quite straightforward, the data contained upon it is often irreplaceable. Worse, it's usually unprotected.

Safe Professional 2007's role in the solution of this problem is to guard and encrypt your data. And it has a selection of tactics at its disposal.

The first, and probably the one people will be most familiar with, is the creation of secure virtual drives. Within these virtual drives you can place sensitive data, which requires people to enter a decryption password to get anywhere near. The program is cautious about what passwords it allows you to apply, giving an indication of the ease by which your chosen one can be cracked. The implication is clear: however much protection Safe Professional 2007 can provide, it can all be undone if you set the password to 'admin'.

Within these drives, the program only permits one user to write to a file at a time. Refreshingly, and overcoming what some saw as a limitation of the software's previous iteration, the size of these drives can now be up to 256GB apiece, and each can also be given a quick keyboard shortcut to allow swift access (although it must begin with Ctrl+Alt).

Further improvements include the adding of extra security for Microsoft's Outlook (although we'd like to see this extended to more e-mail clients), with the necessary files able to reside in a special, protected 'Outlook Safe'. The protective cloak of Safe Professional 2007 can also be wrapped around portable media, such as flash drives and optical discs.

However, a preferable use of the flash drive in the context of this software, we found, was as a decryption key in its own right. In one swoop it removes the necessity to remember yet another password, instead allowing a user to insert their flash drive (although memory cards, cameras, PDAs et al can also perform the same function) to unlock the contents of a virtual drive. An emergency decryption key is a backup if a drive goes missing or a password is forgotten, although inevitably this can also be seen as the chink in some otherwise very impressive armour.

Once data is done with, Safe Professional 2007 then rounds off its package with a data shredding application that we've been unable to trip up. Using up to 35 lots of overwriting and employing several potential methods, it may not keep a Jack Bauer at bay, but it's fair to say its level of file destruction is ample for 99.99 percent of cases.

Safe Professional 2007 is, after a couple of weeks of testing, a resolute, firm and very secure application. We'd be loath to put our neck on the line and say it's bullet-proof, but we've yet to hear of anyone bypassing the immense amount of security it puts in the way of a potential data thief. It can't overcome the human factor where security is concerned, and you do pay a penalty in terms of a slight time delay when writing to a virtual drive, but it does its damnedest to cover every other avenue.

A strong, capable security application that could repay its modest asking price several times over.