You know how important your data is to your business. You educate your employees on how important it is to keep confidential information within your organization and implement security measures to safeguard your data and keep your systems secure. But the very thing that makes working with information necessary is what makes it most vulnerable: your data storage media.
Risks of Data Breaches
When you sell or donate your old computers, you might think you’ve gotten rid of any sensitive data by erasing the hard drives. You couldn’t be more wrong.
People who would want to steal your data know this. They trawl dumpsters, flea markets, and online auction sites looking for discarded drives to harvest data that you thought was inaccessible.
The result is potentially stolen user data, stolen financial records, and possible criminal liabilities under regulations like HIPAA. It seems that there’s always news of some major data breach.
It’s not just hard drives. Old backup media like tapes or CDs can also be found and the data leaked.
Why Deleting Doesn’t Get Rid of Data
When you delete a file on your computer, nothing is physically removed on the hard drive. The operating system simply marks the space on the drive as available for overwriting. While you might not be able to access the data in a particular spot, it may still be there.
The operating system tries to arrange files efficiently, so the next time the drive writes to the disk, it might not use the spot where the data was deleted.
Make Sure Data Is Gone By Destroying It
Since “deleted” data is still there, how can you be sure that your data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands when you get rid of old equipment? The only way to be sure is to physically destroy the drive itself.
It might sound drastic, but the risks of data breaches is much greater.
If you’re looking for a way to destroy sensitive media, please get in touch with us.
