I saw this picture on Twitter this week and thought it would be an awesome topic for Throwback Thursday:
You're looking at 128 GIGABYTES of USB storage vs 128 MEGABYTES of 3.5" floppy disks. Remarkable to stop and think about the advances that are being made even today in flash storage and where we'll be 20 years from now.
The picture is fun but the topic today is USB drives or rather, non-use of USB drives. USB drives are great but can also be lost very easily. So I generally recommend against them for sensitive data. From a compliance perspective, I have the capability of writing to USB drives disabled for all of my healthcare clients. So what do we do if we need the data to be portable?
File Sync and Share (FSS) to the rescue! Consumer examples of file sync and share include Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox among others. Some of these also include "business" versions of their product but I prefer purpose-built FSS products for business. My current favorite is Autotask Workplace. It has advanced features that are important in business - fully centralized control of your data, multi factor authentication, encryption in transit and at rest, external access for internal or external users, mobile device support and remote device wipe capabilities. All of these features are absolutely crucial for business environments. I like Autotask Workplace so much that I include it for all of my clients that require data portability!
I started out by wondering what things will look like 20 years from now. If I had to guess I would say that we won't need mainstream portable devices for data. All data will be stored in the cloud and instantly accessible at whatever device needs it. We're almost there now!
Until next time!
--Jay
