Storage

The cheap, but not necessarily most secure way to protect data on portable media would be to store the files in password protected ZIP files.

Now, since there are many ways to break or crack ZIP passwords, this will only keep out the casual person who finds the disk.

As a business, you would not qualify for most of the free-ware applications.

Of course, one thing to ask yourself and management is how much is at risk and what is the cost of NOT implementing a robust commercial encryption / security solution?

One final alternative is to search the open source community for solutions. Make sure to read the license first so that you know the potential impact on your organization.

One source for open source software is
www.sourceforge.net

Chas