FLASH STORAGE specialist Sandisk has teamed up with interweb security giant Check Point to deliver a secure, virtual machine on a USB stick.

Securing the corporate workplace is the theme being tossed around the Olympian halls of Infosec this week. If there are two buzzwords fighting off thoughts of recession in the midst of tech firms looking for margin, they are security and virtualisation.

If you can serve up both, you're swaggering into the bull-pit, lining up against established adversaries and all manner of new and colourful partnerships.

Take Sandisk, perhaps the biggest brand in Flash, and Checkpoint, probably the most sophisticated snoops on the internet.

These two new best friends have cooked up a way of running a whole corporate network that puts a virtual desktop on a USB stick. Remote users are updated and monitored automatically, with no sensitive data stored locally.

Sandisk is echoing a common call here - that all network data be stored on remote servers. If you haven't got it you can't lose it and no-one can nick it off you.

Sandisk reckons it takes the virtual concept a bit further by putting what it calls the secure virtual workspace on a secure flash stick.

Virtual networks that can securely put an access point on any device are going to be big in 2008. µ