Most business owners will agree that modern times call for desperate measures. Just a quick scan of cybersecurity news shows us just how vulnerable our data really is in the hands of organizations that aren’t taking the proper security measures.
Some driven criminals have even figured out ways to hack very complex and expensively guarded data sets throughout international governments, the US government, and large corporations as well.
Most organization heads are starting to realize that the best way to guard against corporate cyber attacks is to create a media destruction protocol for their organization.
Instead of keeping sensitive data looming around, many organization heads are finding it’s best to:
- Go through their data systematically,
- Either back it up in hard copy form or store it on external servers,
- Decide which devices to reuse or donate to charity,
- Determine the best method to destroy data and sanitize the various drives and media storage devices they have, and
- Destroy any data that the company won’t need in the future
Though many companies will sell you a product and claim it will destroy your data, not all products are created alike. In fact, of the 3 main forms of data destruction, only one is effective all the time.
What are the 3 Top Forms of Data Destruction?
Overwriting
When you overwrite the data on your drives and media devices, you’re replacing the data with gibberish, much like you do when you scratch out something you didn’t mean to write on a piece of paper. Experts recommend overwriting data on your devices 3 or more times for good measure. However, each data overwrite is often as simple as that scribble on your piece of paper.
- Overwrite #1 might be a series of 0’s and 1’s.
- Overwrite #2 might be a famous poem or a pre-determined series of random data, like the “lorem ipsum” text you see on empty web pages; and
- Overwrite #3 might be another series of 0’s and 1’s.
As you can see, a determined sleuth might be able to decode this overwriting with tools not yet created or with mind-numbingly hard work. In addition, if your overwriting program completely misses a segment of your hard drive, the data is still there, left untouched.
After overwriting, your hard drive is also still usable. Many organizations donate these drives to charity. However, experts still have concerns that this method of data erasure is not completely secure.
Degaussing
Degaussing destroys information using magnetization and is the required protocol for the data erasure of highly classified and highly confidential data the world over. This brings to mind the question,
“If overwriting is so secure, why isn’t there only one method, only one protocol?”
Much like the way your cell phone can quickly de-magnetize a hotel key, a degaussing system will delete data from drives and devices. However, the same issue still remains. If the magnet misses some data, the data still remains in its original form.
Complete Physical Drive and Device Destruction.
Physical device destruction is the only way to guarantee that you’ve destroyed every bit of data in every segment of your drive, device, or media.
Contact us today at Phiston Technologies. Our National Security Agency-approved data crushers will turn your data into dust. Our tools destroy:
- Hard disk drives,
- Solid-state drives like PDA’s, circuit boards, smartphones, cell phones, USBs, and laptop HDDs;
- Magnetic stripe cards like driver’s licenses, employee badges, credit cards, and bank cards; and
- Optical media like Blue-Ray discs, DVDs, and CDs
With us, your Device Destruction/Sanitization policy need only be one page long with 3 sections:
- Organize,
- Backup,
- Destroy what we don’t need
