Give your employees something useful this year

We all appreciate the small things in life, especially when our company gives a little something as a sign of appreciation on an anniversary or the end of the year. If you are the lucky one who got an iPad, Ferrari,  or the new Fiat 500 – don’t bother reading on! For the rest of us, receiving a $10 gift card for coffee or a discount on Amazon, things are not that exciting.

Even though it does not add excitement to life, a nicely looking USB leather drive or USB pen can be both appreciated and useful. Imagine if you can preload the company personalized flash drive with SOPs, training materials, forms, or presentations and still make it worthwhile for your employee to have.

This great looking 4GB USB pen with preloaded data and printing on both the box and the pen in 4 colors will cost less than $8 each on 1000 item order. That’s the final price with the delivery!

Palladium USB Pen Drive and Gift Box
It looks better in real life than on the picture. Your colleagues and employees will enjoy its looks and awesome 4GB of storage space (less the space for the SOPs of course).

Make it a smart choice this year, you’ll be glad and rewarded that you did.

Want a fast computer? SSD is your solution.

As usual, folks at Tomshardware spent considerable time in reviewing various SSDs. It is interesting to see how the SSDs progress in defeating HDDs. However, it is only logical that superior technology and the lack of moving parts creates best performance package.

As the author from Tomshardware puts it:

“We understand that SSD prices don’t make it easy to adopt the latest technology. Maybe that’s why you aren’t too keen on blowing a couple hundred dollars on solid-state storage, especially when you can spend the same amount and buy four 2 TB hard drives or a high-performance processor. That’s why it’s important to put things into perspective. Over the past five years, CPU performance has hit new and unforeseen heights, and processors are increasingly spending time waiting on data from hard drives. This is what makes storage today’s most glaring bottleneck. Overcoming it requires an SSD.”

Check out the full review here Summary : Best SSDs For The Money: July 2011.

Secure your data with strong encryption

Flash drives and SSDs (solid state drive) are popular for storing and backing up large amount of data. They are compact and easy to use; however they are also easy to misplace and it is easy for someone to steal these devices.

How do you protect your data? Even if you store pictures and simple documents, there is no reason why your data should be comprimised when it gets into someone’s hands.

The simplest way to protect your data is by encrypting it with strong encryption and strong password. Many people including the author don’t want the hassle of dealing with entering passwords, remembering them, and just the whole ordeal with dealing the “hurdle” that prevents immediate access to data.

While some of us have been delaying with securing of our data, TrueCrypt folks have been busy making encryption of data easy. The encryption software package is small and is available for free. The software can encrypt files, partitions, or whole disks with automatic, real-time encryption with strong encryption standards such as AES.

Installation of the TrueCrypt software is simple and is guided with a helpful wizard. Once the installation is complete and the password is selected, working with your files has never been easier. When working with encrypted partitions or encrypted flash drives or SSDs, the password needs to be entered only once and then your data is accessible and can be used just like on any drive. Once your drive is unplugged from the computer, the data is secure and protected.

When ordering your flash drives, consider security for your own flash drives as well as for your customers. The small TrueCrypt installation can be pre-loaded on your flash drives for free. Secure data should not be optional, protect your flash drives, computer, or SSDs with simple to use encryption package that works seamlessly with your regular computer use.