Hard Drive Shredding For Digital Copiers

!±8± Hard Drive Shredding For Digital Copiers

Secure, Professional, and Complete Digital Information Destruction is absolutely essential in today's digital environment. It's hard to find a single device that we use on a day to day basis that doesn't contain some sensitive information about ourselves or our business.

Most of us have grown accustomed to making sure all our sensitive paper information is destroyed, but we often forget that some sort of electronic device, usually our own, produced all those documents.

In the past few weeks, CBS broke the story that copiers are going out for resale without making sure the information held on the hard drive contained within are being properly destroyed.

The news story here isn't that hard drives and other electronic media should be properly disposed of; it's rather that there was relatively little public knowledge that these copiers had hard drives in them do begin with. And what might be even scarier is that now every ID Thief looking for a quick and easy score will also be on the lookout for copiers that haven't been sanitized.

Every business, government entity, non-profit, and individual needs to be cognizant of each and every electronic device they currently use and the potential sensitive information that these devices hold. Just a few items that must be properly sanitized before disposal:

Smart Phones Personal Computers (PC's) Laptops Thumb Drives Diskettes DVD's/CD Rom's Copiers Printers

Proper sanitization can be in the form of physical destruction, overwrite, or degaussing of these items. Overwriting and degaussing typically eliminate the information held on these devices while at the same time keeping the electronic device intact for future use. This is often seen as the more cost effective approach but in the end these techniques can often take a long time to complete (such as in the case of overwriting) or could be hazardous to other electronic media in the vicinity (as in the case of degaussing).

The simplest, most effective method (where the proof of proper disposal is self evident) is to destroy hard drives and other electronic media by physical means where there is very little left over that is even recognizable - much less recoverable for data.

The physical shredding of hard drives is the only method that not only destroys the drive and the information contained, but also provides the visual proof of multiple pieces so you are left with the proof you need to know your electronic data will never fall into the wrong hands.