Controlling the Rising Risk of Removable Storage Devices in the Enterprise

While removable storage technologies make employees more productive, they also present new threats to IT security. The huge storage capacities and extremely fast transfer rates of today's portable media allow users to quickly save large volumes of data to these highly mobile devices. This compromises the security of proprietary and sensitive information in several ways. Unauthorized users can easily plug in a device and remove valuable data from the organization, and the fact that these small devices can be readily concealed adds to the risk. Even data stored on removable storage media by authorized users can cause serious headaches.