With the advancement in flash drive technology and the ability to hold more memory USB flash drives have become a popular form of transporting documents in the business world. I have received files via a flash drive that contained presentations, videos, and training documents that were quite large and could have been a nightmare to send via email. In a recent meeting that I attended where we had to take back the content and then train our teams we were given all the content on a flash drive. This helped to save printing and shipping costs as we could print on demand the documents we needed and we had access to all the presentations and videos in one secure place. While the convenience is great for companies to have this information so portable it presents a great challenge in being able to secure the data. If a flash drive is lost or stolen it can present monumental breach in confidentiality of the documents and could lead to priority business information ending up in the wrong hands.
That is why you are seeing more and more secure flash drive devices from companies like SanDisk coming onto the market. They offer a host of secure mobility solutions so that your documents on your flash drive can be password protected and encrypted so that they remain secure. Because of the wide spread use of flash drives to transport important documents many companies are having to rewrite their document retention and security policies to include these mobile devices. Now that flash drives are capable of storing up to 64 GB of information transporting large files or video is easier, but presents a challenge to the IT department to make sure that they are secure and can be safeguarded against loss.