At IBM, portable storage devices like a USB, SD card, or flash drive are no longer welcome. As in banned, for security reasons. In the next few weeks IBM will be barring these items from the workplace worldwide.
According to PC Mag:
Instead of portable storage, IBM wants everyone using the cloud and more specifically, IBM's own File Sync and Share service, which it also offers to enterprise customers. That may work for IBM employees on campus, but what about those out in the field carrying out repairs and upgrades? Rather than having a patch on a USB stick, secure cloud access will need to be established instead.
"The possible financial and reputational damage from misplaced, lost or misused removable portable storage devices must be minimized," said Shamla Naidoo, IBM's global chief information security officer.
It's hard to argue against that. USB sticks and SD cards are very easy to forget or lose, and whoever finds them will usually check what they contain. Removing them from the equation completely solves that problem, but the cloud access replacing it needs to be rock solid.
So, this has nothing to do with company security and everything to do with controling and spying on your slaves.
Logan Harris
Pick one. To achieve IBM's level of security you might as well pull a localhost / # curl | bash && ping nsa.gov And then send everything straight to the NSA because that's how secure you are with "cloud access".
Ryder Garcia
cloud is good, but what if there's no electricity? what if the physical server itself is destroyed in an earthquake?
cloud is only good if you have physical back ups of everything
Daniel Stewart
Good luck network booting some old piece of shit mainframe.
Xavier Wilson
so i can still use a CD/DVD to bring in dangerous files? cool.
Brody Campbell
so their employees can't use live distros like tails for private browsing during their lunch break anymore?
Austin Sanchez
...
Christian Brooks
An old POS mainframe is going to have USB?
Grayson Smith
fucking lol
A USB compromises a single computer, maybe. A cloud exploit would compromise anything the company was working on, the hackers could sell the info to the highest bidder and IBM would be neck deep in competitors by the end of the year.
Jacob Lopez
Another step toward the cloud only future meant to ensure the deep mind ai algorithm can learn faster through more information. Anything anywhere will be accessed by deep mind and as it watches it learns the rules,shapes and methods of the physical world.
Brayden Gray
i dont get why so many faggots use "cloud" storage. there are so many issues with it and the principles of it i cant fathom how anybody would willingly subscribe to the idea
Mason Richardson
Because it makes it easy to spy on your employees when you can have one network admin who can see the traffic across their entire branch of the network.
The cloud is less secure, but from a network administration standpoint (where nothing is secure), the cloud is far more secure because you can monitor it and it eliminates most end-user threats to the network that you wouldn't know about until they are trying to infect the network. You can detect those threats much more quickly (and thus respond more quickly) over the cloud. Major hacks are far more damaging, but as a tradeoff, you can usually prevent major hacks (or spot them in their early stages) if you are in charge of the "cloud network" being used.
i was talking more about individual users but youre right about business use cases still i see quite a few issues stemming from ablating usb drives for transferring or storing files
Brandon Smith
Oh I definitely agree, and I imagine they'll make exceptions for "authorized personnel" but generally speaking, if you can get physical access to a site, simply popping in a USB and a sticky note that says "do not remove" on it is enough to scare most employees (and even network techs) from disconnecting it for weeks or even months.
