USB thumb drives are very convenient. It was only about ten years ago that 3.5″ floppy disks that could only hold 1.44 megabytes of data were the norm. It was revolutionary when Iomega introduced the Zip disk that could hold 100 megabytes in the same amount of space. A lot changes in a decade.

Now there are flash drives the size of your thumb that can hold 128 gigabytes of information. That is the equivalent of more than 90,000 3.5″ floppy disks and it fits nicely in your pocket, or attached to a key chain. The same features that make them useful and convenient, though, also make them easy to lose or steal and make them a significant risk to data security.

In Canada recently a USB thumb drive containing personal information such as name, address, phone number, date of birth, health card number, doctor’s name and other health information for over 83,000 patients was lost. Companies and organizations need to realize the risk posed by storing gigabytes of sensitive, unencrypted data on a device the size of your thumb.

Policies should be defined and enforced to provide guidance regarding what data is allowed to be stored on portable media like USB thumb drives. Zecurion’s Zlock can provide the tools necessary to enforce that policy–providing controls to restrict access to external devices, including printers. For data that is allowed to be stored on USB flash drives, Zlock can create a shadow copy providing an audit trail detailing the data that was transferred.

Additionally, organizations should use secure USB flash drives like Ironkey or SafeStick, and/or protect the data using tools like Microsoft’s BitLocker-to-Go encryption to ensure that any data contained on the drive is protected even if the device is lost or stolen.