Safety On The Move
What has your business got to loose?
If you are a typical business, quite a lot; although you may not realise it.
The invention of easy to use, portable storage devices, such as the USB memory stick has changed the way people work (it certainly has for Morgan Walsh). The ease of copying presentations, working files and client data to a memory stick encourages business users to take data with them, to work on at home, on a clients site or perhaps on a trip away.
While this flexible approach is very convenient, there are serious dangers that must be recognised. Specifically, the business is not able to control the data or even know what data has been taken outside the relatively safe office environment. Worse, many memory sticks are lost on public transport, hire cars, other peoples offices etc and the vast majority of memory sticks are not encrypted (that is, anyone can read it).
Aside from the inconvenience, the information contained on that lost memory stick is now in the public domain and could be used to cause harm to your business either by selling the information to competitors, identity theft or often posted on the Internet for all to see.
Do you know what's on your memory stick at any point in time? Probably not.
We strongly advice businesses to adopt their ICT acceptable usage policy to cover the use of memory sticks, to only use memory sticks for non-critical data and ideally use some form of encryption for all files on the memory stick.
One product we have been extremely impressed with is the secure memory stick from American firm Ironkey. It provides military grade encryption directly on the memory stick and does not need to have software installed on your clients machines to read the files and data.