1. Important Reasons for you to Hire a Hard Drive Shredding Company
Most offices have a problem of unnecessary data taking up space on computer hard drives as well as hard copies. It is possible that your office now looks old and overcrowded and in most cases, your entire system finally slows down and will need to always be kicked on the side for it to reboot. Any person whose office has such issues had better think about some form of clearing up or data destruction. This is especially so when you clearly know at the back of your head that those documents taking up all that space will never be used again. While this is something you may want to do on your own, it is always a good thing to let the professional deal with it; there are good reasons to hire hard drive shredding experts.
Professional:
Unless you are a technician, you definitely might know the best way to dispose of hard drives or hard drive shredding using electromagnetic waves. There are experts who are trained in hard drive shredding who will do the job without a hassle. They know the different ways of destroying data such that all the levels of privacy and security are met. However, one thing you must be careful about is the fact that not every data destruction expert is genuine; some are only out to cash in on a lucrative business and can be risky for your business. You need to hire a reputable data destruction company that is duly licensed and who have the correct equipment needed for this type of assignment.
Knowledge and experience:
Since these companies are professionals, they have the necessary training. This is important because some of the computer parts are made of metal components that can be harmful when they get exposed to the environment. This is the main reason why only experts should be allowed to dispose of such materials. There are some of these experts that will do their job as you supervise the processes they use so that you can be sure the hard drives are completely destroyed to your satisfaction.
Secure:
Some people who wanted to save a little of their money have left allowed their own employees to try and destroy data but this left them with a bitter taste in the mouth. In some cases, people actually get hurt while in others the process went the wrong way with several undesirable consequences. Data destruction experts are specially trained and will, therefore, ensure all the safety rules and standards are adhered to during the hard drive shredding process; they have the necessary tools and proper safety gear that helps them work fast and effectively.
Article source: zuarticles.com
2. Advantages of Hard Drive Shredding
Most people get worried when they are about to recycle their electronic components like their computers. Data in the disk is not permanently removed unless you deliberately remove yourself through overwriting, physical disk destruction, and degaussing. Destruction is the best method for protection if you are concerned about sensitive data. It is a more secure hard drive disposal, and that is using a hard drive destruction machine. It is important to erase data from the hard drive before selling it. You want to ensure that data would not be recovered anymore once you have deleted it.
There are plenty of people who think that the tasks required to erase your hard disk data are tedious. There are a number of reasons why a company might need to dispose of information. You have to be careful about the kind of hard drive shredding that you use. File shredding lets you choose the most wanted file you want to be removed and the software will only remove that file. Data destruction is the way of removing remnant data in a disk by executing methods to get into the remainder data and make it unrecoverable. Secure, Professional, and Complete Digital Information Destruction is absolutely essential in today’s digital environment. You need to think about is how to dispose of your electronic media in a safe and secure way.
There are many companies who specialize in secure hard drive disposal. You should ensure for use these companies. Data destruction is a hard drive disposal technique used by many. The other method that is commonly used to destroy electronic media is degaussing, where magnets are used to destroy the information. Doing a clean hard disk erase, you would make it extra difficult for snoopers or spies to check the file that you have in your computer.
Hard drive shredders get relieved of confidential data by overwriting the deleted files. It is also equally important to destroy and dispose of data that is no longer required or useful for business purposes. Physically destroy the hard disk if it is damaged and cannot be run your computer to do the software wiping. It is natural that you might have tried your level best to remove all the details from the computer hard drive but it will remain in some corners. Disposing of the files the normal mode would be giving someone access to the information listed on the document files. If you really want to erase your private data permanently beyond recovery, you should make use of good file eraser software.
Advantage of using hard drive shredding for data destruction are these.
● It touches only your deleted files.
● It can’t harm your hard disk drive.
● Hard Drive Shredding removes any chance of your data ever being recovered.
Permanently hard drive erasing from a hard drive is in practice extremely difficult. Do the hard disk disposal yourself. Play around with your disk or unleash your rage in it by using house tools to strike, pound, drill, or even burn hard disk drives. Software destruction, while not as foolproof as physical data destruction. Physical data destruction, as the name suggests, is the method by which data is completely destroyed via the destruction of the hard disk itself.
Articles source: selfgrowth.com
3. 3 Ways to Destroy Your Data
There are three sure-fire ways to make sure data can never be pulled off a decommissioned hard drive or backup tape, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In a chapter on security considerations in The NIST Handbook, NIST says, “three techniques are commonly used for media sanitization: overwriting, degaussing, and data destruction.” These techniques can be used just as easily by small businesses as large companies.
1. Overwrite 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 several times; NIST recommends overwriting the hard drive three times. Several programs are available to help you overwrite your hard drives, including two freeware utilities, Secure Erase and Eraser. Overwriting your hard drives lets you reuse them but is less secure than degaussing your storage media.
2. Degauss your hard drives and backup tapes. Degaussing means to demagnetize; so, degaussing as a data destruction method magnetically erases data from your magnetic storage media, like hard drives and backup tapes. This method generally makes the media unusable after it destroys the data, which is fine when the media has reached the end of its useful life. If you choose this method of data destruction, you can hire a service for either on-site or off-site degaussing. Look for a provider that complies with standards set by both NIST and the National Industrial Security Program (NISP) as well as any federal legislation that applies to your company, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
3. Destroy your hard drive and backup tapes. The most secure way to destroy data—and the storage medium it’s on—is by shredding it, just like your paper documents. The large, industrial shredding machines grind up the storage media into unrecognizable bits of scrap metal. You can hire a shredding service to come to your office and shred your hard drives and tapes on-site, under your supervision, so you can be assured that no one accessed any of the data before it was shredded. If possible, find a service that recycles the scrap metal. As with a degaussing service, a shredding service should be compliant with all federal security standards.
A few data destruction don’ts
It must be said: Don’t rely on the delete function to erase your data. Deleted data can still be retrieved from hard drives and tapes, which can be a huge security risk if you just toss that media into the nearest waste bin. In addition, you can’t trust the format function to fully erase your data. Just as there is software that can restore deleted files, there is software that can retrieve old data on re-formatted disks. Even taking a hammer to an old hard drive might not completely destroy it—unless you smash it into an unrecognizable mash of metal and plastic.
Article source: blogs.cisco.com
