Businesses and government agencies know that they have a legal and moral duty to protect sensitive and personal data whilst it is in transit. Yet somewhat amazingly, endless reports in the media confirm that many organisations persist in carelessly using unprotected and unencrypted USB devices. IronKey has the answer, and boldly claims that it offers the world's most secure solution for transporting data, desktops, and identities. The Enterprise solution is IronKey's flagship product and it provides fully centralised remote management and policy enforcement, for all IronKey devices. This allows businesses to deploy many thousands of USB flash drives to their users with complete control over each and every one.

Central to IronKey's products are its USB flash drives. These are extremely well constructed and robust; and look capable of shrugging off the most extreme conditions and abuse. The steel cases are waterproof, epoxy filled, and use wire mesh shielding to prevent their contents from being electronically scanned. In addition, the flash drives have a built-in CryptoChip delivering AES 256-bit military grade hardware encryption. This has a number of advantages as encryption cannot be disabled and the host system's processor is not required to carry out any encryption or decryption duties.

The IronKey flash drives are cutting edge and were the first on the market to meet the stringent FIPS 140-2 Level 3 standard. Furthermore, all of the security keys are only stored within the CryptoChip. Because they are not stored in memory, this eliminates susceptibility to attacks, such as cold boots. For remote management, you can either deploy the Enterprise Server on your network or use the SaaS (Software as a Service) option. We opted for the latter and found the initial set up process easy enough. We started by creating our first administrative account and a wizard took us swiftly through the default settings. These include the ingenious Flash-Trash which causes the drive to self destruct after so many failed login attempts. And no, it doesn't go up in a puff of smoke, but has a built-in hardware mechanism that destroys the keys, securely erasing all stored data by writing zeros over it; so it might just as well!

The IronKey Control Panel loads when a flash drive is inserted, and it provides access to the management tools. These include device administration, a secure backup facility for flash drive data, and access to applications that can be run directly from the drive.

We used the default Mozilla FireFox which loads swiftly and provides a totally secure browsing environment. It is only this that can be used to access the dashboard to administer all of your company's users and flash drives. The smartly designed interface opens with status charts for all registered users and devices, plus a world map showing where all your users were last spotted using their flash drives.

Device policies enforce a range of security measures, such as the Flash-Trash counter, password strength and complexity, along with backup permissions, password self recovery services, and which onboard applications will be available. Along with FireFox and the backup utilities, you have an optional scanner, and this prevents malware from executing code on the flash drive. The Silver Bullet service is activated within selected policies and it adds extra layers of access controls. You can check that the user is located on a trusted network and remotely deny access to devices using the dashboard. If a flash drive is reported as lost or stolen, the remote detonation option can be applied to it and the next time it is inserted it will self-destruct, rendering it completely useless.

With solutions like IronKey Enterprise, businesses have no excuse for not protecting sensitive data on the move. We found it very easy to deploy and administer. It offers levels of security for USB flash drives that are probably the best that money can buy.

Product: IronKey Enterprise
Supplier: IronKey Inc.
Tel: 0161 870 6369
Price: From £59 excluding VAT for a
1GB USB flash drive
Web site:www.ironkey.com