With great data comes great responsibility. Well, that's what Uncle Ben would say if he were handling your terabytes of sensitive data.
Countless companies capture and store sensitive data every day for authentication, authorization, order tracking, sales analysis, and more as well as report it across multiple trusted channels. But, once unauthorized users capture and take hold of data, it can easily fall into the wrong hands.
Protecting this precious information is paramount, given the growing number of cyberattacks affecting hundreds of thousands of consumers at once. Data leaks can happen due to human mistakes, poor software security, or storage device failure.
Protecting your organization’s financial, customer, and other business-critical data requires a layered approach. Data destruction is often the last line of defense against a data breach. It destroys existing data while safeguarding against hardware reuse risks.
Data destruction software allows users to completely wipe hard drives and digital storage devices, including compact discs (CDs), digital video discs (DVDs), and USB memory devices, cleaning up valuable space for repurposing or disposal.
Data destruction is the process of completely and irreversibly removing data from computing equipment. It ensures that unauthorized users can't recover information from disposed devices.
As people and organizations depend more on electronic devices for storing important data, adequate data destruction is critical. Properly destroying data removes it beyond recovery using any known technology (such as email archiving and hard drive cloning).
Data security is a critical issue with increasing data on hard drives, tapes, and other media. Data destruction facilitates data removal and reinforces digital safety. It’s the electronic equivalent of shredding paper documents and disposing of them in a trash bin.
Data destruction is not the same as file deletion. Although a file erased from a business device such as a laptop is unavailable to the end-user, the information still exists on the hard drive in some form. Data destruction deletes data in its entirety, rendering it unrecoverable.
Data destruction software is an easy and cost-effective way of erasing essential documents, emails, business applications, operating systems, and other computer data. Enterprise data destruction software is a business process management (BPM) tool that ensures executives and leaders have the necessary operational controls to successfully meet regulatory compliance.
This software further helps companies meet compliance regulations by destroying data or preventing the recovery or reuse of files or other information based on an organization's specific needs.
At a time when businesses of all sizes rely on digital media for key business processes, they must protect all data such technology generates. Business transaction data is key to managing many important commercial aspects. Business owners depend on this data to keep track of income and expenditure, inventory, and other sales info in a convenient and secure place. Data backups are also crucial to recovering lost information.
Carefully disposing data at the end of its lifecycle is an essential practice. You may have sensitive data that you don't want to share with anyone. Additionally, your organization might need to destroy legal records, primarily if you operate globally as different countries and regions have different data destruction laws.
Companies with old and unnecessary hardware should follow the proper steps for data erasure before discarding and selling the hardware. But if this isn't followed, data from such devices could end up with someone it shouldn't be.
Data destruction is vital because it prevents nefarious data exploitation. Proper data disposal reduces security risks. It’s imperative to ensure that your retired IT data doesn’t endanger your business. In the long term, improved audit trails can lead to greater business outcomes.
However, many businesses are still behind the times when it comes to data destruction. They must first identify the data to be destroyed and the types of devices it’s stored on before calculating the total cost of data deletion.
Businesses should also consider regulatory compliance and documentation requirements while destroying data. In some cases, to ascertain compliance standards are met, regulatory authorities may seek video evidence of complete data destruction.
Finally, for companies with large amounts of data, some digital document destruction services providers offer IT audit services, where they assess private inventories, provide reports, and propose data destruction solutions.
Data destruction services or data destruction tools have consistent standards to dispose of electronic data, typically fulfilling contractual obligations or complying with legally enforced data destruction laws.
Before deciding how to destroy old data, it's critical for any business to consider a few key issues.
Data destruction can be a little daunting and tedious. Fortunately, there are various methods for destroying data. But unfortunately, none of these strategies are flawless, and often no single technique can guarantee total success. However, understanding these approaches can help you select the one that best suits your business needs.
Here are some commonly used data disposal methods:
Although deleting a file from an electronic device removes it from a file folder, it doesn't erase the data. The data remains on the device's hard drive or memory chip. The same thing happens when you erase data by reformatting a disc. This, too, doesn't remove the data. It only replaces the current file system with a new one.
It's like ripping the table of contents out of an old cookbook when you want to get rid of the cookbook. It's relatively simple for unauthorized users to recover data from a reformatted disc using various online applications. These methods are pretty sloppy, unoriginal, and ineffective in deleting data.
Data wiping is the process of erasing data from electronic media so that no user can access it. Wiping data from hard drives is usually accomplished by connecting them directly to a wiping device or using wiping software. Wiping saves a device's essential features for future usage; however, it's a time-consuming procedure.
A thorough wipe can take many hours. Companies with a significant number of obsolete hard drives may find the procedure delayed due to time restrictions. Data wiping is extremely valuable if an organization prioritizes retaining its storage medium for practical and financial reasons.
Overwriting is a data erasure technology that uses software to thoroughly wipe all sectors of a hard disc drive or other digital storage media. It obliterates existing data by overwriting it with unreadable characters such as 0s, 1s, and so on. Businesses can also use specialized data overwriting algorithms to implement this approach.
The pattern doesn't need to be random; security teams can use predetermined patterns instead. In most cases, overwriting the data once is enough. However, when dealing with high-security material, you require many passes. This ensures no bit shadows are detected, and data erasure is foolproof.
A bit shadow is a residue of data that has been overwritten but identifiable with an electron microscope. It's similar to when someone writes a message on a notepad. They can remove the top piece of paper, but an imprint of what they scribbled might still be visible on the page directly below.
Bit shadowing is an issue for high-security organizations, but low-risk companies certainly don't need to worry too much about it. Recovering data with an electron microscope takes a long time and costs a lot of money.
Like wiping, overwriting is a time-consuming process that takes several hours for each device. Because this technique requires access to information to hide it, users cannot overwrite a broken or corrupt hard disc.
Degaussing involves demagnetizing a hard drive tape or storage mechanism to neutralize a device and destroy its data. Since high magnetism harms devices beyond usage, media degaussing is one of the most secure means of data destruction.
Degaussing can efficiently and quickly erase a significant volume of data on a device. Military personnel generally employ degaussing to ensure hard drives are not used again.
Degaussing electronic media refers to the process of reducing or totally erasing the magnetic field (and hence the recorded information) within storage media such as hard discs, cassettes, diskettes, tapes, and reels. A degausser demagnetizes the media with a strong magnetic field, erasing all device data.
A degausser provides a stronger magnetic field with higher coercivity than the target magnetic medium to rearrange or randomize its magnetic field direction. Matching the degausser's strength to the medium coercivity is critical for efficient degaussing.
Degaussing has three main drawbacks:
Physical destruction involves destroying storage media such as hard drive platters, flash memory chips, USB flash drives, mobile phones, optical media, internet of things (IoT) devices, point-of-sale (POS) devices, etc.
This method employs brute force to destroy the physical hardware, leaving the media and underlying data unavailable for recovery. Data can be physically destroyed in various ways, including shredding, drilling, melting, or any other process that renders physical storage media useless and unreadable.
Physical destruction can cause issues. First, it's vulnerable to human mistakes and manipulation. Auditing the physical destruction process is challenging. Second, even if the drive is useless, most physical destruction methods leave considerable portions of the drive platter intact.
In such situations, unauthorized users can still retrieve data via forensic techniques. Only pulverizing the disc to particles makes the data irretrievably lost. Finally, as physical destruction renders media illegible, it can’t be erased and resold. This indicates that there’s no longer any chance of recovering whatever end-of-life (EOL) value these assets may have.
Shredding is another type of physical destruction and the most secure and cost-effective technique for destroying hard drives or solid-state drives (SSDs) that have reached the EOL. It's also incredibly effective for IT asset disposition (ITAD) of commonly used assets such as optical drives, cellphones, tablets, motherboards, thumb drives, and credit card swipe devices.
Shredding is a great way to erase data if you have a large data enterprise center or a significant stockpile of obsolete hard drives and media that you want to eliminate. It's safe, fast, and efficient.
This process shreds the storage medium, such as the drive platter and the electrical and mechanical components, into minute fragments as tiny as 2 mm in size. The physical decay destroys the data on the medium.
Shredding should be your first choice if you operate in a high-security workplace with high-security data since it ensures total data destruction.
The growth of electronic data paved the way for data destruction (or data sanitization) policies in recent years. These standards specify regulated procedures for implementing physical and logical data destruction techniques such as shredding, incineration, degaussing, data erasure, and so on.
Data deletion is a critical and expanding organizational necessity, given the exponential growth of data, storage systems, and data protection rules. The solution is a data destruction policy that binds the backend methodologies, personnel, and procedures into a cohesive system to allow rigorous and consistent frontend performance.
A data destruction policy is the formal record of the ideas and policies that drive a business toward safe and compliant data disposal. This approach attempts to develop a relevant system and train employees on specific activities for data deletion.
A carefully crafted strategy can help businesses manage favorable data destruction outcomes across all data lifecycle streams and touchpoints. For example, you can vividly visualize your company's ever-expanding client data, collected through activities such as sales, subscriptions, third-party acquisitions, and so on.
This enormous data can be in different states simultaneously, including data at rest, active usage, and data in transit, constantly changing hands. A data destruction policy guarantees that all business entities permanently destroy the information when its intended use and permission conditions expire.
Data destruction is a complex job for businesses of all sizes and disciplines. This is due to data's prodigious expansion, types of storage media and lifecycle stages, evolving danger scenarios, and increasingly rigorous data protection rules. Given these complications, implementing "best practices" is crucial to achieving good data destruction results. The following approaches can help your company navigate the twisting route to success.
Before selecting suitable data destruction techniques, understand the different media types that comprise a device. For example, a desktop PC can have an HDD, SSD, ROM, RAM, and a motherboard with integrated memory. Similarly, smartphones often include an embedded non-volatile memory chip and a detachable memory chip.
Furthermore, mobile devices, notably Android smartphones, tablets, and other handheld or portable devices, employ microSDHC and microSDXC cards to enhance their built-in storage capacity. These non-volatile memory cards can contain extra data that can't be efficiently erased using native sanitization procedures. You should contact the device manufacturer to verify the sanitization technique for removable and non-volatile memory.
To ensure data security, you should wipe any hard drives before passing them over to third parties, such as resellers, IT asset destruction providers, e-recyclers, charities, etc. For example, wiping all hard drives before shipping them to offshore shredding operations eliminates chain-of-custody issues.
Furthermore, erasure protects the warehoused IT assets from hardware theft and data leakage hazards. Common scenarios involving such transactions include device resell, return, donate, exchange, disposal, and so on, in which an organization invariably loses control over the storage media and the underlying data.
To determine the efficacy of a specific data destruction technique under relevant data protection and sustainability standards, you must carefully evaluate the final results. In addition to validating the results, test and calibrate the sanitization equipment, such as the degausser or workstation, and assess the probable maintenance requirements.
You should also consider an individual's expertise in carrying out different data destruction techniques. If employing a service provider, make sure you get a Certificate of Destruction.
Data destruction is an important part of every company's data protection strategy. Disposing of data correctly is integral to a successful data breach response. As businesses and corporations collect more information on their clients and employees, they must develop a way to dispose of the collected data. Here are some major benefits of data destruction:
Data is priceless, and as a responsible business, you should ensure your data remains safe even after it’s longer in use. The breadth of data management doesn’t end with erasing and overwriting old data on the device.
Here are some common challenges of data destruction:
Data destruction software employs a software-based approach of entirely wiping data from a hard drive. It’s also known as data sanitization software, disc wipe software, or hard drive eraser software.
Data destruction software completely eliminates data on storage media. Each data destruction program uses one or more data sanitization methods capable of permanently overwriting the data on a device.
If you need to eliminate all signs of a virus or want to recycle or dispose of your hard drive or system, wiping your hard drive with data destruction software is the safest approach to safeguard yourself.
A product must meet the following criteria to be included in the data destruction software category:
*Below are the five leading data destruction platforms based on G2 data collected on March 03, 2022. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
WipeDrive allows businesses, government organizations, and individual users to safely and permanently delete hard drives, portable media, and mobile devices. The platform provides a cost-effective, safe, and socially acceptable solution to recycle and decommission computers and storage media.
"We were able to wipe devices in an office that was being sold off from hundreds of miles away, deploying the WipeDrive via PSExec. It worked perfectly for our use case.”
- WipeDrive Review, Chris G.
"On-site wiping can be a challenge if there is no internet connection available. Some equipment requires minor changes in the BIOS before running the software. The support is very helpful when any issues or problems arise.”
- WipeDrive Review, Kevin K.
Transcend is a data privacy structure and destruction software that enables businesses to efficiently offer their consumers control over their data. Personal data is unorganized, difficult to find, and spread across several platforms. As a result, organizations find it difficult to provide data rights such as erasing customer data. Transcend automates fulfilling data requests within organizations across all their data systems and providers.
"Transcend made our team's work-life much better, and it can provide automated solutions which make the team save quite some time. Moreover, I think they have a great support team. They are always available to clarify doubts over email or chat channels and provide solutions tailored to your needs.
I appreciate that they never exclude the possibility to make something happen upon a client's request. Also, the reporting piece is quite nice. I appreciate that you can download a report with just one click, and you don't need to wait extra time to have it downloaded on your laptop.”
- Transcend Review, Martina D.
"We faced some challenges while integrating with Transcend. After follow-up, these issues got resolved”
- Transcend Review, Ramachandran K.
DiskDeleter is data destruction software that deletes all data from various devices, including PCs, servers, HDs, SSDs, and USBs. DiskDeleter is stored on a portable USB memory stick, providing instant access to many memory devices, effectively allowing deletion operations to run in parallel.
"As an IT Manager in one of the Fashion Clothing companies in the USA, I used DiskDeleter to recycle and repurpose the IT assets. I chose this product due to our continuous requirements of safeguarding data when we provide our laptops and computers to new employees and business partners.
DiskDeleter is very cost-effective due to its flexibility of unlimited uses. Also, I like its support of all devices, including SSD, which we were looking for. As the number of SSD PCs in use has grown, the need to sanitize SSD data has also increased. Returning or disposing of an SSD PC without wiping its SSD could leak data. By using DiskDeleter, it's straightforward to wipe the SSD as it's making sure at each instance it generates a certificate of data sanitization.”
- DiskDeleter Review, Internal Consultant in Apparel & Fashion.
"The program license is tied to a USB memory serial number and requires an initial set up. Mostly program download time, but still it takes about a half an hour.”
- DiskDeleter Review, Consultant in Computer Software.
Active KillDisk is a powerful and portable software that lets you destroy all data on hard drives, SSD & USB discs, and memory cards, eliminating the chance of data recovery from destroyed files and folders. It's also a disc sanitation and partition eraser application that supports US DoD 5220.22-M and over 20 international data cleansing standards.
"KillDisk has been a go-to for me on wiping disks for many years. The best part I like about the software is that it just gets the job done. It is simple to use and provides the kind of peace of mind knowing that data is sufficiently wiped.”
- Active KillDisk Review, Hunter B.
"Sometimes, it seems a bit slow. If the software could operate faster, it would be even better.”
- Active KillDisk Review, Hunter B.
DriveStrike is a cloud-based data and device protection service that supports small and medium-sized organizations with data security and compliance. DriveStrike safeguards devices and data against loss, theft, or use in remote areas. It allows businesses to remotely find, lock, and erase devices they control to avoid data intrusion.
"The software is simple to operate. I appreciate that you can remotely delete a device by logging into the administrative interface and turning off the computer in case it's stolen, and the data is safe.”
- DriveStrike Review, Nomagugu V.
"The software accomplishes exactly what it says it will, and it does so quickly and effectively. So I would not say there is any dislike on my side.”
- DriveStrike Review, Nomagugu V.
An appropriate data destruction technique depends on the type of storage medium, data sensitivity, and an asset's end-of-life value. Overall, having a reliable equipment and data disposal strategy that incorporates best practices for safe data disposal and secure data destruction is critical to developing a compliance culture within your organization.
In doing so, you establish your company as a trustworthy, dependable partner, which has become increasingly challenging in today's data-centric environment.
How about preparing for the worst? Learn how disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is quickly becoming a popular concept to enable data protection with cloud computing.