Moore’s Law has been around since roughly 1965, essentially stating that computing power doubles every two years. There are some caveats to that, but that’s the basic idea. And, we all know it to be true, as memory capacities continue to skyrocket and processors get faster (or we get more of them in parallel). Whether or not it will continue is a topic outside of my scope here.

A major pitfall for businesses and individuals alike comes from the fact that it’s trivially easy to misplace, oh, enough data to fill the Library of Congress, say 1,000 times. Don’t hold me to the strict math here but the point is that data storage devices are unbelievably small.

The other day I purchased an 8 GB SDHC card for my BlackBerry Bold. I opened the package and couldn’t help but remark that the card itself was the size of my pinky fingernail. 8 GB!

I actually may go ahead and get a 32 GB card.

I confess that I’m just still absolutely amazed by this, as I remember days when a 10 MB disk was about $100,000, weighed about 500 pounds, and half of it was backup. But now, $10 for a 8 GB thumbnail. Astounding, I say.

But back to the pitfalls–how easy is it to lose an object that small? Rather, how hard is it not to lose it, perhaps I should say? Readers here are probably already familiar with the drastic damage of laptop theft and loss, for essentially the same reason, but as you are inventorying your business and are taking stock of what devices are being used, be very careful not to overlook the smartphones, thumb drives, external hard drives, SDHC and similar cards, and so on. Massive damage awaits the business who loses any of these devices without proper protection, from laptops to the smallest of storage chips. Don’t forget the “250 GB thumbnail!”