Jammu, Aug. 25 -- The Jammu and Kashmir Government has ordered a complete ban on the use of WhatsApp and pen drives for any official communication, in a decisive move to strengthen cyber security and protect confidential data.

As per the order, the use of portable storage devices has been declared impermissible in the Civil Secretariat, district offices, and subordinate administrative units, unless specifically authorised under controlled whitelisting. Instead, all departments have been directed to exclusively use GovDrive, the government's dedicated cloud-based platform, for data storage and inter-departmental exchange.

GovDrive, developed as part of the secure e-Governance framework, offers each registered official 50 GB of storage sp...