Symbio Technologies Readies Next Generation Symbiont Boot Stick

Online, August 15, 2010 (Newswire.com) - NEW ROCHELLE, NY-Symbio Technologies announced plans today to release the second generation of its Symbiont Boot Stick, part of its suite of stateless endpoint provisioning products. The Boot Stick is a small flash drive that plugs into the USB port of any personal computer or laptop and creates a trusted endpoint that can access a user's virtual desktop from anywhere in the world. First introduced in 2009, the Boot Stick is geared toward teleworkers and mobile professionals who work with sensitive information that the organization cannot afford to have lost or stolen.

"We designed our Boot Stick to answer the many requests we received from our customers for a device that would allow road warriors and telecommuters to log on to their organizations' data centers and work securely. Those organizations, which include government agencies and security-sensitive institutions such as health care providers and financial institutions, have to be sure that all of their data remains inviolate on their servers," said Symbio's CTO, Gideon Romm.

"Many organizations attempt to solve the problem of data loss or theft using encrypted drives. Unfortunately, simply encrypting the data that leaves the organization does not ensure that it will not be lost or stolen. Moreover, in a server-centric computing world, encryption of local storage does not prevent access to the server, and access to the server must be granted only to trusted individuals on trusted machines," continued Romm. "The Boot Stick is really designed to create a trusted machine that cannot be compromised and never stores data."

The tiny SBS uses its own encrypted firmware, so it has no effect at all on the OS that may be inside the PC or laptop in which it is inserted. The Boot Stick runs in a read-only mode and no non-volatile memory on the host is ever used. The host machine may be compromised by viruses and malware and the Boot Stick will still create a completely trusted machine. The new firmware release will improve auto-detection of third-party devices and adds a higher level of centralized management.

"When it comes to allowing remote workers, the IT challenge is not simply about secure access - it is about trust. It is one thing to trust your users, but to secure information, you need to have trusted machines, as well. The Boot Stick ensures you have a remote system you can trust," noted Romm.

"According to a survey by the independent research firm the Ponemon Institute, more than 600,000 laptops and 800,000 storage devices were lost or stolen in 2009. Anyone who used one of those machines to download data from his or her organization, or even to access the organization's network, was putting their company and their customers at extreme risk. Using the stateless approach embodied in The Symbiont Boot Stick eliminates that risk."