One of the big complaints companies — and especially their finance folks — have had about using the iPhone for business has been the lack of secure data wipe for the device. But Apple recently announced that’s changing.

Apple is ensuring the secondary market success of iPhones by building secure data wipe into the 2.0 version of its software, according toAppleInsider. Several sources report the Gold Master versions of the software could be released internally at Apple and possibly to developers as early as June 27.

Citing “People familiar with the beta versions of iPhone Software v2.0,” the AppleInsider report says the upcoming release will employ a more foolproof method of erasing all personal data and settings from an iPhone. As is the case with the existing version of iPhone software, the function will be accessible by selecting Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Contents and Settings.

Unlike today’s iPhone software the revised function will wipe data in similar fashion to the “Secure Empty Trash” function of Mac OS X, by which all data is deleted, unlinked, and then overwritten several times to make it irretrievable by even the savviest of recovery tools.

This feature should be welcome to anyone looking to sell their first-gen iPhone and upgrade to the 3G model, as well as to those who will follow the same path with subsequent iterations of the phone.

The improvements to the iPhone’s data wipe will arrive at a time when masses of original iPhone owners will be attempting to clear information from their handsets and resell them to others after upgrading to an iPhone 3G.

iPhone software 2.0 will also include among its many enterprise-ready features a function called “remote wipe” that was designed to protect data stored on iPhones by offering a means to remotely wipe them clear in the event that they are lost or stolen.

According to official statements made by Apple during its developers conference earlier this month, and in a press release, “iPhone 2.0 software will be available on July 11 as a free software update via iTunes 7.7 or later for all iPhone customers.”

The caveat is that the new data-wiping method will take considerably longer (up to an hour) than the method available by the current software version, but time seems a small price to pay for piece of mind.

Experts says Apple’s existing erase-and-restore function leaves all of a user’s personal data “sitting in the unallocated blocks of the iPhone’s NAND memory.” And there’s no viable, publicly available method for erasing the personal data from the Apple handset.

Tags: Apple, data, iphone, security, Software, upgrade, wipe