Biometric Thumb Drives?

osopolar asks: "I work as a security analyst for a 10 billion dollar bank and we are currently looking for biometric thumb drives as emergency backup/recovery solutions for our local branches. We do not have IT people at every branch so the backup must be done by a branch manager, so the device needs to be easy to use. How would you backup information securely? What thumb drives do you recommend?"

Comments

Re:missing laptop

[4D6963]

I can only imagine some bank manager "now where did I put that thumb drive...."

It applies for alot of other small devices in other jobs. If you're an FBI agent and that you lost your security access card, if your some guard and you lost your keys, etc etc, it's just the same as if you're a bank manager who lost his thumb drive.

You're just not supposed to lose that kind of stuff, period.

With your title

[Incongruity]

Were I your employer, I'd be a bit concerned that you're asking slashdot this question....

No offense really intended, but the question is too vague and too open-ended to really be answered well here and it's that lack of specificity that makes me worry a bit about your qualifications for the position you're in. By all means, please, bring in outside help for any situation that you need advice on -- for the sake of your employer and customers, but slashdot is not the best place for high-quality, industrial grade advice that you should hang your hat, job, and other people's money on. That having been said, what exactly are you trying to back up? How frequently does it need to be done? How quickly? How will restores be handled -- who will do them, when and why? What are the demands of the media? Does it need to be simply stored on site or will it be transported? How (mailing? courier?) Would a networked option work for backing up? If not, why not?

That's just a start to the questions that are really unanswered (and need to be) for anyone to answer your question "How would you backup information securely?" It sounds like you think a thumb-drive will be an acceptable answer to you, but it's unclear why you've settled on that...What makes such a system better than a well scripted encryption scheme and commodity media (anything from CD-Rs to removable tape or hard disks?)

Without knowing the specifics, any answer would be incomplete at best, shooting blind at worst...

Check out Realm Systems iD3 devices

[Mr. Jaggers]

The guys at Realm Systems have a line of small usb servers (a bit wider than an ipod nano) that have a gig or so of flash memory, a PowerPC processor, and fire up a desktop on your machine when you plug them into a USB port. They are running an embedded Linux distribution and use a biometric thumbprint scanner to authenticate their users. Each device can be administered by a management router box in your bank's network.

Check them out! Their web site is www.realmsys.com