Who Gets What?

For today’s enterprise employees, it’s tough to beat the convenience of portable storage devices. Affordable and user-friendly, these devices can help employees take work with them wherever they go, regardless of file size and type. But as these products increasingly populate the workplace—whether distributed by the organization or not—it’s essential for IT managers to develop a strategy for effectively matching the right device to the right employee.

“Remote users will always find a need for portable storage devices because of simplicity and lower price points,” says Skip Taylor, vice president of product marketing for Fiberlink Communications (www.fiberlink.com). “The popularity of personal applications and devices [such as] iTunes and iPods will only fill up the existing hard disk solutions in place today. On the positive side, more employees are working from a home office, where backup systems may not always be in place, so, in this example, an external storage device would make sense to support and/or offer.”