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Paul Noronha

Flash forward: (From left) SanDisk executives Mr Gavin Wu, Asia-Pacific Managing Director; Mr Sanjay Mehrotra, Founder-President; Ms Manisha Sood, Country Manager (India & SAAARC); and Senior PR Manager, Mr Mike Wong, on a visit to Bangalore last week. (On the right) The flashmemory leader has introduced special enterprise versions of its USB `Cruzer' devices, with central management and control software to ensure corporate usage. - Anand Parthasarathy

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore April 13

Sometime the sheer convenience of a product can make it vulnerable. The ‘Thumb’ drive — also known as Flash drive, memory stick or USB for universal serial bus) drive — is a case in point.

The tiny device has come as a Godsend for PC and laptop users who need to carry a small selection of their files and data — to plug into any available personal computer, when required.

Great as it goes — but its very ease of use and ubiquity has made it a threat to corporate security. Findings of a survey just released show that an overwhelming 77 per cent of business users polled said they used their personal USB drives to store work-related files and data — at some time or another.

The problem is people tend to lose their drives, often leaving them behind on public machines — and with no encryption or protection, they can be read by any finder.

“Data leaks can lead to identity theft, loss of trade secrets or compromise of intellectual property” says SanDisk, the US-based, Indian-co-founded world leader in Flash storage and the inventor of the USB drive, who commissioned the study

There is a way out — and during his visit to India last week, the SanDisk co-founder, President and COO, Mr Sanjay Mehrotra, shared details of the company’s recently-released version 3.0 of the central management and control (CMC) software that manages SanDisk’s Cruzer Enterprise USB Flash drives and protects all files stored on them with mandatory passwords and 256-bit AES encryption.

Unauthorised finders cannot crack the code — and the authorised users can quickly replicate its contents on a fresh drive from data stored on the CMC server.

This is just one of the ways, the usage of Flash memory is being made increasingly robust, Mr Mehrotra said, on the sidelines of a visit to the company’s Bangalore-based India Device Design Centre.

The team here collaborates with two other SanDisk R&D centres in Japan and in the US on a new hard ware and software in NAND Flash technology.

With solid-state Flash drives replacing hard disk in small form factor PCs such as notebooks and hand-held computers, capacities will soon match typical hard disk sizes, Mr Mehrotra added. By end 2008, Sandisk is expected to offer solid state drives (SSDs) in the 1.8 inch size for notebooks with storage of 128 GB. By 2011, this capacity can also be expected in even tinier sizes — the secure digital or SD card used in mobile phones and digital camera.

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