Anyone in charge of corporate IT has had the nightmare of an old hard drive ending up in the wrong hands. Your business, from trade secrets to client data, could all be compromised if sensitive data gets places it shouldn’t.
If someone at your company is collecting old hard drives from a dusty storage closet and throwing them in the dumpster, all of your historical data is putting your current business at risk. Secure data destruction is the only way to ensure that old data you don’t need anymore is permanently deleted — with no hope of nefarious actors reviving the sensitive information inside.
We go to great lengths to make sure that what happens at a Deft data center stays at a Deft data center. Our processes make sure that sensitive information on old storage media doesn’t leave our facility intact. We erase it, crush it, and dispose of it following the most stringent standards of data deletion.
Here’s how we do it:
3 Steps to Certified Hard Drive Destruction
Putting an old hard drive in its final resting place takes specific, industry-standard machines and processes that ensure nothing on a storage device can be extracted ever again. If you visit Deft’s Elk Grove Village facility, we recommend seeing the process of secure data disposal in person. It’s even more intense than the video.
Step 1: Degauss the Data
First we want to erase any of the data that lives on the storage device. Degaussing is a fancy word for what happens when you put a magnet too close to your credit card — magnetic force scrambles the magnetic fields of the data storage device, rearranging them until it is completely unable to function as originally intended.
We use an NSA-compliant degausser that takes in the device, shoots it full of strong magnetic energy, and spits out a hard drive that’s completely demagnetized.
Step 2: Destroy the Drive
While the probability of getting any data out of a storage device that went through that intense degaussing process is next to zero, we like to make sure that any sort of forensic data recovery is physically impossible. That’s why we use a Data Destroyer for complete hard drive destruction.
This machine holds the device and then splits HDDs and SSDsa right down the middle. It’s like watching one of those satisfying hydraulic press videos but for all the data that could put your business at risk. When it’s done, the drive is physically destroyed and ready for safe disposal.
Step 3: Provide the Proof
That’s how we make double-sure your data is destroyed. The last step is how you make triple-sure. We issue a Certificate of Erasure and Destruction, which catalogs the serial number and model number of your destroyed storage device. There are also before and after pictures to show just how destroyed your old hard drives are now. Pass this data death certificate along to your audit department for proof of secure data destruction.
It may be deeply satisfying to destroy data, but we don’t do it for fun. These high standards of destruction are set by government and industry associations, and we follow all of them to the strictest definition:
- NSA/CSS/DoD
- NIST SP 800-88r1
- IRS 1075
- CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act)
- GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
- GLBA (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act)
- HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act)
- PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act)
The Certificate of Erasure and Destruction that Deft issues will give your business peace of mind and create the paper trail you need to achieve certification and comply with the law.
If you want to trust that your old hard drives, SSDs, backup tapes, and any other sensitive data storage devices are gone forever — open a ticket with our Remote Hands team to get started.
