Since January, when I traveled to speak in St. Louis and my luggage went to Detroit, I’ve been leery of checking my bag. Besides factoring in stops and layover time, I consider arrival time, engagement start time, the likelihood of shopping for business apparel, the ability to receive an overnight delivery, and my general luck. If all that adds up, I hand the bag over. Well, until yesterday that is. And that’s fine. I get it. Safety wins over hair gel.

So, why am I writing about this at all? I was thinking about the U.K. restrictions and enterprise IT. From today’s WSJ:

Rules are a lot stricter. All hand baggage is prevented from being carried into the aircraft cabins, except for a few exceptions such as travel documents, prescription medicine necessary for the flight and pocket-size wallets and purses, which must be placed in a plastic bag. As part of this rule, laptops, cell phones and other devices must be place in checked luggage.

Laptops, blackberries, smart phones, mass storage devices (iPods, voice recorders, usb keys) will be out of your people’s hands, and through dozens of others, for hours at a time. Of course, this got me thinking about data protection: removing unnecessary data, encryption and backups.

From there, I started thinking about USB keys and portable storage devices. What’s really inside a standalone USB key? Could a storage device (current or future form) be deemed safe to carry on? Will we find ourselves checking machines and carrying on the heavily encrypted data?

Then though, I started thinking about why mobile professionals carry data laden machines anyway. It’s to work in terminals and on the plane. At the endpoints, home, office, meeting, conference, hotels, there’s connectivity -- to people, data, and applications.

This made me jump to Ray Ozzie and how connectivity provides opportunity for everything-as-a-service.

So now, I find myself thinking about data-as-a-service, information-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, temporary storage, trusted data keepers, and traveling data light… Thoughts?

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