Disposing of your hardware without properly sanitizing the drives first not only leads to data breaches but also heavy fines. It is because you might don’t have in-house expertise or equipment to organize proper sanitization yourself. An individual needs to outsource these tasks to an external vendor. However, in the era of breaches, companies can’t take a risk for data destruction and data security.
Define Data Destruction Process
The shredding staff performs the following tasks during the sanitization procedure-
· Records every serial number
· Shreds the device drives
· Produces a certificate of data destruction
· Eradicates the Drives from machines
· Documents the accurate details your data security compliance team requires
· Sorts remaining parts into disposal or recycling piles
How is Personnel Involved?
Two or three data sanitization technicians arrive with the truck. One tech scans the devices while the other manages the physical drive destruction. In case you don’t have hardware ready for shredding upon the team’s arrival to your services, additional technicians assist to decommission and prep the hardware for secure data destruction.
What are the Options for Data Destruction?
Physical data destruction includes disintegrating, shredding, melting, and puncturing. Its benefit is it completely destructs the equipment that contained entirely sensitive information, preventing any potential data breaches. It leads to no compliance fines, violations, or criminal charges.
Another one is data degaussing. It is the procedure of erasing magnetic data stored on media such as a hard drive. The data is instantly erased when opened to the powerful field in degaussing data destruction. It has the benefit of eliminating data swiftly where demagnetized data is not recovered.
Overwriting Data, known as data wiping, includes writing new data on top of old and replacing data no longer in use. Further, irrelevant and old data not replaced is illegible. Set patterns replace original data when overwritten. Therefore, it allows for later verification that data was overwritten. The benefit of overwriting data is it is the safest way to dispose of information and does not include any physical destruction of equipment. Each method is crucial. If you want to encourage electronic recycling methods, physical data destruction is the best method.