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Secure storage erasure - When and why is it necessary?

Wednesday 12 October 2022

This article is aimed at businesses or organizations that want to ensure that data stored on their storage media cannot be accessed by unauthorized parties after it leaves their organization's control, and how to manage it.

What is data deletion?

All your business-sensitive data must be deleted from their storage media?

"Delete" is not enough!

Storage media erasure is the procedure of processing data stored on storage media to eliminate the possibility of its recovery and reconstruction to an acceptable level. Some forms of erasure will allow you to reuse the media, while others are destructive and render the media useless.

When should an ΙΤ manager consider deleting or destroying their storage media?

There are several situations in which you may need to erase your storage media:

Reuse: When you want to assign a device to a different user or reuse some equipment within your organization. You may also want to sell unwanted equipment, which can be reused elsewhere.
Repair: You may need to return a defective device to your supplier for repair or replacement.
Disposal: It is very likely that you will need to delete unwanted storage media before it passes out of your organization.
Destruction: If you want to destroy your sensitive data on your own premises or you want to send your storage media off your premises for destruction.

In all of the above cases, the media will be outside of their normal operating environment and therefore subject to greater risk — from different users, from third parties, or from less trusted organizations.

The risks of non-deletion

If data-bearing surfaces are not properly treated when data is erased or destroyed, data may remain on them. This can result in the following problems for your business or organization:

  • Don't know where your sensitive data is
  • Critical data could be retrieved and used by your competitors
  • Private or personal data about your customers or staff could be used to commit fraud or identity theft
  • Your intellectual property could be repossessed and published openly, leading to loss of reputation and revenue

Storage media risk management

To better manage the risks associated with sensitive data held on storage media, you should:

  • evaluate your data and its potential value outside of your organization.
  • find out the cost of the deletion and add it to the administration costs. Set aside part of your budget for this.
  • have a policy for reusing and disposing of your equipment
  • record the life cycle of your storage medium (what is it used to store, where and for how long? )
  • have reliable partners who adhere to recognized standards.
  • obtain certificates of destruction from third party destruction services.
  • ensure that where destruction procedures and equipment are in place, they are checked periodically.
  • ensure that your data is properly deleted;
  • take care to remove, before disposal, all labels or marks indicating the ownership of the device (or the nature of the data contained)

Alfanet solutions

At Alfanet we attach great importance to the secure management and disposal of business data. That is why we have certified services and machines for their safe deletion or destruction. In fact, in order for the customer to ensure that the deletion operations of his storage media have been completed successfully, we issue a certificate of deletion or destruction of data.

If you want to know more about Alfanet's certified data deletion or destruction services, click here.

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