Information security has become a key priority for most organisations. According to a survey conducted by PC Quest recently of mid-sized enterprises, security was the second key technology on their deployment priority list. One of the most common ways of information theft is from the portable USB storage devices that are carried around by employees. That is why most organisations prohibit the use of such storage devices. This can become inconvenient, especially when people have to share large files with each other, and they?re in a place where the local network is inaccessible.
That?s where the Imation Defender H200+Bio can be a good option. It?s a storage solution that provides data security and huge storage capacity. Unlike other external storage devices that offer data security where you have to install a software, and that device can be accessed from machines having that particular software installed. That?s not the case with Imation Defender H200 which has hardware based authentication system for biometric as well as traditional password based user authentication.
Defender H200 utilises biometric capabilities through an ergonomic swipe sensor with hardware-based matching. The registered user of the drive can authenticate his fingerprint and access the drive from any Windows or Mac OS systems.
The device has in-built Defender Access software that can be used to personalise and manage the device. For the first time as an administrator you can set a number of users and their biometric authentication and passwords. You can also set the number of password or biometric retry limit, after which the user is blocked. Then administrator of the device can rescue the blocked user. Also, there is a feature of ?Data Destruction?, so that if it is turned on and the user gets blocked, then the data in the drive is destroyed automatically. This is useful to avoid information from being leaked. When the Defender H200 is plugged in any Windows or Mac system, it shows a drive partition named ?Locked? having nothing in it. Until the registered user swipes his finger to authenticate himself the device?s partition remains locked. Upon successful authentication the locked partition is opened and the user can read write data into the drive. The device has dedicated cryptographic processor that delivers AES 256-bit encryption of data stored into the drive.
When data security is of prime importance, performance can take a back foot. We created a user in this drive on a Windows 7 machine and copied a few files into it. Then we plugged the drive in a Mac OS X based machine. The machine showed the locked drive, which got unlocked seamlessly immediately after the user authenticated with his fingerprint. To check its security, we even tried opening it on a Linux (Ubuntu) based machine. We found that upon plugging in, the drive did show up as locked, and even opened after we did a fingerprint authentication, but we couldn?t view its contents as it was encrypted. To check data transfer speeds, we attached the drive to an AMD Phenom II X4 2.60 GHz based Windows 7 machine with 4GB RAM. The drive clocked an average transfer speed of 15 MB/s and 18.7 ms access time on HD Tune benchmark, while transferring 1 GB data from PC to drive took 1min 9 seconds and for reverse it took 28 seconds.
The drive has excellent data security features and is ideal for corporate mobile users for preventing data theft unwillingly from their side, but price is on higher side.
? CyberMedia www.LD2.in
Mail:talkLD@cybermedia.co.in