The people responsible for the IT security of many businesses in the UK are worried that portable storage devices - like USB flash drives and other storage gadgets - are making information harder to protect.

At this year's Infosecurity Europe Show, SmartLine questioned IT managers about the issue and found that 80 per cent believed their company had lost valuable confidential data through the use of these devices.

Just one of the IT security experts said that their company did not use such devices in order to reduce the risk.

"Although these gadgets are designed to be perfectly harmless, unfortunately it doesn't take much for them to become a major security headache," explained Sacha Chahrvin, the UK and Ireland's managing director at SmartLine.

"It's all too easy to use them to siphon off valuable data. Even legitimate users can simply lose the device, or have it stolen.

"Organisations really do need to ensure that they have the right security measures in place to protect themselves from this type of data leakage."

Some USB flash drives feature encryption of the data stored on them and some even have finger print recognition software built-in to improve security.