In my last article, I described the ClipDrive Bio, a family of USB flash drives with an integrated fingerprint reader and control software.

Guy Martino of Biometric Technology Solutions was the person who very kindly brought these devices to my attention last year. His company has been using the devices in a wide range of technology integration projects, and he has sent me some interesting reports of the ways clients have been using them.

* One of his clients has used it to replace the hard copy of their disaster recovery (DR) operations book, which weighed 14 pounds. Now the 50-plus people on the DR team can more easily carry it 24/7 and are not concerned about losing the sensitive company data stored on the drives.

* Another client is an NFL team that has its playbook stored for each player.

* At a daycare center with 300 young students, each teacher now has the names of the students, their family contact data and other important info at their fingertips 24/7, whether at school or at home.

* A community college used the device to replace network storage and password support for students. All students are responsible for their own files and can use college workstations securely anywhere on campus or their own PCs to do their work without having to access network drives.

* The company’s biggest application is in law firms, where attorneys use the secure flash drives to travel with sensitive files. They can carry software for a thin client (that’s a computer, not a person) of Citrix on the public partition of the drive, so they are free to carry files to their legal clients (those are people, not computers) even if the clients (the people) are not running Citrix on their computers (whew). The USB flash drives are bootable devices, as are the much larger-capacity Outbacker hard drives.

Finally, Martino let me know recently that the access-control software has been updated and that his company offers free upgrades. He writes, “The new version (4.2) has a much better user interface and has added some new features; it will be available by the end of February 2005.”

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, is Program Director of the Master of Science in Information Assurance program at Norwich University.