Gartner Identifies BlockMaster as a Noticeable Vendor within Encrypted USB

BlockMaster has been mentioned as a notable vendor by Gartner in the report “Market Share: Flash Cards, USB Flash Drives and Sold-State Drives Worldwide 2010″.

In the secure USB flash drive and extreme secure USB flash drive segment Gartner has identified BlockMaster and the main competition MXI, Ironkey and also BlockMaster’s partner Kingston.

One can only concur with the report; government spend on secure USB in the USA 2010 brought a year of waiting. This was true for many tenders as legislation and policy tried to play catch up, in many cases turning a blind eye to the bigger issues, like: how do the users circumvent the prohibition of USB, private email accounts, insecure file shares, mobile phones. For the government organizations this is of course a dangerous situation that prevents them from moving into a more secure, cost-efficient and productive solution as there have been bans (existing and lingering). Of course this is not the only situation where legislation and policy desperately tries to play catch up with fast moving technology, a never ending losing battle it seems. But for sure there is a significant trend that the market for managed secure USB flash drives now is opening up.

What remains interesting in the Gartner report is that looking at the market share figures for the secure USB flash drive and extreme USB flash drives segments, this refers to hardware-encrypted password protected USB flash drives there is a crucial factor missing; management.

“Gartner overlooks the management component in the report. This is what makes secure USB flash drives on a mass adoption scale become feasible.”

What ties it all together for the customer is when device meets server and they adopt a centrally managed secure USB drive solution. The Market Share: Flash Cards, USB Flash Drives and Sold-State Drives Worldwide 2010 is targeted at hardware and I can appreciate the difficulties in capturing this rapidly evolving software server market space. But what truly is going to drive secure USB flash drives into mass adoption within professional organizations is the combination of great devices and great management coming together to serve up a final solution to the USB problem (the data losses, the malware and the security pains).

We are proud and thankful as any vendor to be recognized by Gartner and we look forward to seeing the market of managed secure USB drives grow at an even faster pace than it did in 2010.

Download our White Paper on “Benefits of Centrally Managed Secure USB Drives >>