USB drives are small, portable, and provide incredible amounts of storage space. They’re a dream for users—but a security nightmare for IT staff. McAfee Encrypted USB offers data protection in the form of powerful encryption technology combined with strong access controls, so that only authorized users can read the information stored on USB drives.

USB drives are small, portable, and provide incredible amounts of storage space. They’re a dream for users—but a security nightmare for IT staff. McAfee Encrypted USB offers data protection in the form of powerful encryption technology combined with strong access controls, so that only authorized users can read the information stored on USB drives.

Convenient and easy to use, USB flash memory or 'thumb' drives are an increasingly popular means of storing and transporting data. Lose one, however, and anyone can access the files they contain unless you routinely encrypt or make other arrangements to protect them. McAfee takes care of most of this for you with its family of secure USB storage devices (previously from SafeBoot) offering built-in data access and encryption facilities.

There are several different products to choose from, McAfee sending us three, starting with the Standard drive (from ?18 VAT for 128MB), which uses simple passwords to control access, with each user allotted their own private, AES-encrypted partition.

For those wanting a little bit more, the Encrypted USB Phantom drive (from ?100 VAT for a 1GB device) adds a built-in fingerprint scanner for secure two-factor authentication. Meanwhile the mIDentity implementation (from ?141 VAT for 1GB) uses a smartcard and a PIN code to more securely store user credentials and can also be used for remote VPN authentication.