We all know that the data and files on a laptop — or even on those ubiquitous USB pens that everyone uses to store files on business trips — is typically worth hundreds or thousands of times more than the device itself.
Losing your laptop on a trip is a trifling matter compared to years of accumulated confidential data finding its way into the criminal underworld. You may wonder what criminals would do with your files, but these problems pose a real threat.
A friend had an email recently from a (thankfully honest) eBay buyer in Austria who had acquired a laptop on the site and found all my friend’s confidential information — bank details, health matters and so on — on it. So lesson one for this month: do, please, keep anything remotely private in passworded files. They won’t exactly keep the FBI at bay, but will deter casual thieves from delving.
This minimal level of security won’t help, however, if, as we all do in the real business world, you use a combination of computers on your travels. Sometimes you don’t have your laptop with you, or the battery has run down or it’s too much fuss to get it out. So we all find ourselves borrowing PCs in hotel business centres, internet cafés and even competitors’ or clients’ offices to send a few emails or plug in that USB pen to tweak a file.
It’s all mightily convenient but is also incredibly insecure. Every time you use a third party computer, you leave clear pawprints all over it. Anybody with a mind to can discover what you’ve written and which web pages you’ve been on. Alter a Word document on a business contact’s machine and they should without too much difficulty be able to access not only the final version of your vital presentation, but all the previous versions too.
Wouldn’t it be useful, I have often thought, if there were a way of a third party PC being merely a hardware shell, devoid of data or software, and for all your personal or confidential corporate material to exist and be manipulated online, in
a secure environment?
Well a new British company, Mobiu, started by two savvy ex-Vodafone guys, has done just this. Its thus far unique black USB dongle-like device acts as a super-secure key to an online vault-cum-office where all your company’s work can effectively go on. It even contains its own software suites — a proprietary word processor/spreadsheet combo that is Office compatible and an onboard copy of the Firefox web browser, so every aspect of your remote working can be independent of the machine you happen to be using.
Using Mobiu, your laptop and your workforce’s laptops (and desk tops) act merely as remote terminals. If a computer is stolen, it contains not even a trace of the websites you have visited or the work you have done. Everything interesting is held remotely behind impervious security.
With Mobiu, any Windows PC anywhere in the world becomes an office machine, securely connected to the company network and with unlimited data — terabytes of the stuff if you need it — available to you and all your colleagues. If your Mobiu itself is lost or stolen, it’s not much use because it’s heavily secured, but anyway has a phone chip on board that means it can be killed off remotely by a command from Mobiu. The company will even get out a replacement to you by courier.
The system is also, when you think about it, a cheap and efficient way of turning your workforce’s home computers into part of your office network — without the risk again of any data at all getting into the wrong hands because not a shred of it will exist in any form on the host PC.
Mobiu costs £159 per unit. Visit thekeyrevolution.com
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