Now where did I leave the USB flash drive?

More and more employees are going mobile and remote, and for good reason: It often makes it easier to keep or recruit qualified talent at a good price, and you don’t even have to pay for office space to house them. But it also means a lot more data floating around. A recent Check Point survey underlines the threat (do note that Check Point, a security management vendor, is fairly vested in the outcome here):

According to the survey of 224 IT and security administrators, over 40 percent of businesses in the last year have more remote users connecting to the corporate network from home or when travelling compared to 2008. Check Point discovered the clear majority (77 percent) of businesses have up to a quarter of their total workforce consisting of regular remote users.

Yet, regardless of the growth in remote users, Check Point found just 27 percent of respondents say their companies currently use hard disk encryption to protect sensitive data on corporate endpoints. In addition, only 9 percent of businesses surveyed use encryption for removable storage devices, such as USB flash drives. A more mobile workforce carrying large amounts of data on portable devices leaves confidential corporate data vulnerable to loss, theft and interception.

Unfortunately, all these security measures come at a cost: Added management complexity, reduced speed and reduced convenience. The reason USB drives are so popular, after all, is because they’re simple enough for almost anyone to understand: Plug in, drag, drop, pop out. But that convenience has cost thousands of people their Social Security Numbers and other sensitive information over the years. Maybe it’s time to take a harder look at what we pay for that trade off.