Are you subject to federal regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, Graham Leach Bliley, PCI or The Consumer Data Protection Act? Each of these federal laws requires you to ensure consumer and/or medical data is secured while in use and ultimately destroyed. These laws have created challenges for businesses as computer hard drives and backup tape media must be destroyed or erased as they reach end of life. Penalties for not protecting or losing these types of data can be stiff and pose a significant business risk. It is no longer acceptable to just throw away old computers or give them to eWaste recyclers.
To be in compliant, businesses handling HIPAA and Consumer data need to have a formal process and documentation for data destruction. A transfer of ownership certificate is normally required to show who the protected data or media was released to. Subsequently, the service provider must provide your business with a certificate of destruction.
Common media containing federally regulated data include:
- Backup Tapes
- Workstation Hard Drives
- Server Hard Drives
- Thumb Drives
- Floppy Disks
- USB Attached Hard Drives
Compliant Methods of Data Destruction
Demagnetizing- Uses a large electromagnet to thoroughly wipe magnetically stored information from media.
Shredding- Large industrial shredders are used to completely destroy hardware media.
Overwriting- “DBan” style formatting includes writing zeros throughout the media to ensure data is erased. Commonly used drive formatting is insufficient as it only erases the indexes to date, while leaving the actual data intact.
Pulverizing- A common method of destroying hard drives is pulverizing them with a large mechanical press. This method shatters the hard drive’s platters making them non-recoverable.
EasyIT Provides Data Destruction Services to its Managed Services Clients. As part of this service, we provide our client’s with the required documentation including a transfer of ownership certificate and a certificate of destruction.
We use the following methods for data destruction
For Tapes:
- We magnetically degauss tapes to ensure all data is erased.
For Disk Drives, USB Thumb Drives or USB Attached storage devices we either:
- Pulverize and shatter disk drive platters or perform low-level DBan style drive erasure.
Once the destruction is complete, we will supply you with a certificate of destruction stating exactly what equipment was destroyed and how.
To find out more about our computer equipment and data destruction or get a quote, please contact us at sales@easyit.com or 614.339.4999 .