Why you should ban USB drives at school

After spending hours restoring desktops recently, which a clever student had booted from a rogue USB flash drive loaded with Malware, it dawned on me that the convenience of these handy little gadgets might just be overrated. And when combined with the benefits of the cloud, specifically the free cloud available to students via the Office 365 (live@edu) service, the risks vs. benefit ratio has clearly tipped towards risk.

I know it seems like such a simple way to transport data like homework, projects, photos, etc, but it also just as easy to transport utilities that can destroy the hard drives on your computers, take direct control of the underlying computer hardware, or modify computer registry errors in a way that is nearly impossible to repair.

You may have the very best security practices in place, such as a perimeter Unified Threat Management (UTM) device, endpoint Anti-Virus protection, and separate VLans (network isolation), and yet be vulnerable to a meltdown caused by a free download from the Internet attached directly onto a PC in your school. It is nearly impossible to guarantee computer security if there is physical access to the device.

Banning USB devices is one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce the cost of network administration in your school.

But aside from the security aspects, there are also some real practical benefits of tossing those USB drives. Let’s take a look at the advantages to see if they don’t, in your specific circumstance, outweigh the benefits.

Here are the top 10 reasons why you should ban USB drives at your school, in favor of the cloud:

• 10) Eliminate the cost of purchasing the hardware. At $5.00 - $75.00 ea. (depending on capacity), you could save a bundle of money.
• 9) Reduce the cost of managing the devices – tracking these identical (presumably) looking devices and accounting for them can be burdensome.
• 8) Avoid the cost of replacing the devices – responsibility for replacing the drives when they are lost; placing identity (ownership) upon them is difficult.
• 7) Reduce plagiarism - unauthorized sharing of work is nearly impossible to detect and prevent while using a flash drive.
• 6) Improve collaboration – accountable sharing of work is possible in the cloud, impossible on a flash drive.
• 5) Reduce support costs – time spent unnecessarily managing infected or otherwise misconfigured hardware is a real cost.
• 4) Lower the cost of your infrastructure – spending money on student servers can in most cases be completely eliminated.
• 3) Improving teacher to student interaction – with cloud based services, teachers can simultaneously push information to an entire class of students.
• 2) Increase student access to teachers – individual work can be made available to teachers with no extra effort by the student other than saving the work to their private cloud space.
• 1) Eliminating the excuse of “I forgot my homework, it's on my flash drive!” Homework is always a device away (computer, tablet, phone, etc). Presuming it is done, of course!

There you have it, ten solid reasons to ban flash drives from your school.

Now if you are more gently persuaded, have plenty of resources, and don’t want to offend anyone’s sensitivities, you could adopt a more persuasive approach to the matter by making cloud services available to your students and making flash drives subject to inspection if used on school computers.

Given the chance, smart students will quickly realize the tremendous advantages of using their own private cloud and soon leave their flash drives at home.