At some point, most sensitive data must be destroyed properly or you could be putting your company at risk by disposing of old data and storage improperly. If you’re replacing old and outdated computers, servers or storage media like tapes and compact discs, you will need to purge all the business data that exists on those media.  There are many ways to correctly dispose of your data.

For CD’s and DVD’s, you can purchase a disk shredder and shred them. For the decommissioned hard drive and tapes, here are three ways to make sure data can never be recovered.

  1. Overwriting your hard drives- Overwriting your drives is more than simply selecting a file and deleting it. You need to overwrite each area of the disk many times. DBAN is an  effective erasure software program that is free of charge. It automatically deletes the content, but there is no audit ready reporting for regulatory compliance, and it does not detect or securely erase SSDs.  You can also use ERASER, an advanced security tool for Windows, which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
  2. Demagnetize your hard drives and backup tapes – Demagnetizing means to degauss as a data destruction method that magnetically erases data from your magnetic storage media. This procedure makes the media unusable after it destroys data. This is fine when the media has reached the end of its life and you’re about to dispose of it. You can look for a provider that complies with standards set by NIST and NISP, as well as any federal legislation applied to your company that can be done offsite or onsite.
  3. Destroy your hard drive and backup tapes – The most secure way to destroy data and storage media is by shredding it, just like your paper files. There are large industrial shredding machines that grind up the storage media into bits of scrap metal. You can also hire a shredding service to come to your site and shred your drives under your supervision, so you can be assured that your confidential files can’t be accessed by anyone before destroying them.

How are you destroying your data? Should you have some questions on how to deal with your old hard drives, backup tapes or other storage medium call us today at 630-365-0025. We will help you to know more about destroying your data safely.