The IT leaders of today are very much aware of the risks linked with inadequate disposal of end-of-life equipment. The major concerns include damage to the reputation of an organization, theft or loss of patron or customer information, punitive fines, criminal charges and theft or loss of intellectual property. In spite of these concerns, there is a huge amount of confusion concerning erasing data properly on the end-of-life assets. Failure to adequately destroy data via data destruction services on end-of-life IT equipment results to serious breaches of privacy policies and data protection, problems of compliance and additional costs. Hard drive destruction or data destruction process is equipped with three chief options- overwriting, degaussing and physical destruction.
Overwriting
Overwriting makes use of writing new data over the old. The process is same as recording over an old VHS tape. As this process erases the old data and leaves whatever is left entirely unreadable, this kind of data destruction is also called data wiping. When data is overwritten, a pattern of 0’s and 1’s is written over the original information. At times, a random pattern is made use of but a set pattern can also be utilized which makes way for later verification that the hard drive was wiped by identifying the set pattern. For a lot of situations, overwriting data once is enough. Nevertheless, for high-security applications numerous wipes might be needed. This offers an added level of guarantee that the old data is destroyed.
The downside to this process is that it takes a good amount of time to overwrite a drive of high-capacity. This process may not offer the capability to sanitize data from regions that are inaccessible like host-protected areas. Overwriting might need a separate license for each and every hard drive and the process is not effective without any good quality processes of assurance.
Degaussing
Degaussing is a data destruction process that makes use of a high-powered magnet to interrupt the magnetic field of the storage medium and destroy the data. When applied to magnetic storage media like magnetic tape, floppy disks or hard disks, degaussing can effectively and quickly purge the whole storage medium.
Even though degaussing is a great data destruction method, it offers two chief advantages. Firstly, degaussing makes the hard drive inoperable by physically disrupting the sensitive interconnected drive mechanisms. This destroys any probable end-of-life value. Secondly, there is no means of ensuring that the entire data is destroyed. Since degaussing makes the hard drive inoperable, there is no method of running the drive to make sure that the data is gone. The efficiency of degaussing also relies on the density of drives. Lastly, it needs to be noted that degaussing does not eliminate data from non-magnetic media like CDs and Solid State Devices.
Physical destruction
If you do not want to reuse hard drives, you can consider physical data destruction. Data can be destroyed physically in a range of ways including drilling, melting, shredding or any other method that makes the physical storage media unreadable and unusable. There can be certain issues linked with physical destruction. The method is prone to manipulation and human error. There is no trustworthy way of auditing the process of physical destruction. Also, a lot of methods of physical destruction leave huge portions of the drive platter intact even when the drive is inoperable.
Data can still be recovered utilizing forensic methods. Only when the disk is pulverized to particles, data becomes irrecoverable. Finally, since physical destruction makes the media unreadable, it also averts them from being remarketed and wiped. This implies that there is no chance to recover any end-of-life value that the assets might possess.
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