All the IBM employees are banned to use the removable storage devices. The company has taken this move to stop the leakage of company’s trade secrets and financial data to the press and the competitors. However, the ban on the external storage devices is said to be problematic for the employees.

IBM had already banned the removable storage devices in the specific parts of the corporation. Now, the company has decided to expand this ban policy on the global scale in next few weeks. The banned storage devices include SD cards, flash drives, USB-based hard drives, and solid-state drives.

IBM supported their ban decision by declaring that the employees can easily share their content by using the desktop plug-ins between Windows or Mac desktop and IBM Connections & Connection Cloud. Further, the company has suggested the employees to sync to get the latest copy of the file, irrespective of their location they are opening the file, that is, desktop, connection server, or Connection Cloud.

The company has admitted that the ban on using the external storage devices for moving data can be disruptive for some employees. But the company’s new globally enforced policy will be helpful to avoid massive data leakage as in 2013, where the former employee had leaked about more than hundreds of pages of company’s cloud computing technology. There was another leakage miss event in January when a presentation slide was leaked. The leaked slide had revealed that IBM may cut around 10,000 staff.

IBM announced the collaboration of IBM Q Network with North Carolina State University. It is said to be the first university-based IBM Q Hub in North America. This collaboration may accelerate quantum computing as the university will work with IBM to enhance quantum computing and industry collaboration.