What Is Data Sanitization? How It Safeguards Your Business

The world of data security is wild. So many dangers lurk around every corner.

Data security is a major concern for businesses. While you should always be concerned about security and privacy, it's imperative if your business deals with sensitive data such as credit card information and personally identifiable information (PII).

If someone gains access to your database, they can potentially access all your customers’ details. Not only would this be bad for business, but it could also get you in legal trouble.

It's not enough to protect sensitive data where it’s collected or even stored. The data transmission chain needs to be secure all along, such as during hardware manufacture or transit of IT assets. Data security is a significant issue in cloud computing, where IT teams constantly swap out hardware, inadvertently exposing data during user transfer or transition.

Businesses looking to protect confidential information from unauthorized users while complying with government regulations commonly use data sanitization. Data destruction software helps businesses with large amounts of sensitive information quickly sanitize their media devices. The main goal of these software products is to protect them from accidental and unauthorized data tampering or theft.

Simply put, data sanitization renders data irretrievable by any means, even with advanced forensic tools.

This can be particularly important for storage devices that contain sensitive information, such as medical devices and hard drives with sensitive or personal data. A company's finances, employee records, customer information, or other sensitive or proprietary data is destroyed so that no third party can access it.

Data sanitization is a vital part of privacy and security in the modern world. Other more traditional forms of protection against data theft are encryption and data-centric security. Alone or without these security methods, data sanitization tools can prevent someone from stealthily stealing your hard disk drives (HDDs) and information.

Data sanitization is an important component of many companies' information technology (IT) security policies. There’s a growing awareness of the potential risks of hard disks and other storage media that can be stolen or misplaced and lead to significant losses.

As a result, businesses now adequately sanitize their storage devices before disposal to keep the underlying data confidential. Considering how data stored on computers, tablets, and smartphones are precious to cyber attackers, any efforts to destroy or remove this information from devices can be a positive step in preventing data loss from intrusions.

Why is data sanitization important?

As a storage equipment's usable lifetime and storage capacity increases, IT assets retain critical company data after they’re retired. When a company's IT assets approach the end of their useful life, they’re scrubbed to obliterate any sensitive data housed on the equipment before destroying or reusing it.

This erasure is necessary as more and more data is moved to digital storage, raising security concerns if the device is resold to another user. Data sanitization has become more relevant in recent years as sensitive data is retained in electronic form, and larger, more complicated datasets store information.

Electronic storage facilitates extensive storage of critical data. As a result, businesses adopt more complex and extensive data sanitization procedures to erase data before decommissioning their assets.

Data sanitization software security has become a genuine concern with cloud-based information sharing and archiving. It’s only natural for governments and private businesses to develop and implement data sanitization regulations to prevent data loss or other security problems.

Data sanitization methods

Data sanitization primarily cleans devices and destroys all sensitive data once the storage device is no longer in use or relocates to another information system. This is a critical stage in the Data Security Lifecycle (DSL) and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

Both ascertain privacy and data management throughout an electronic device’s lifetime since they destroy data and make it unrecoverable when the device or data reaches the end of its lifecycle.

Physical destruction

The simplest technique to sanitize a device is to physically destroy the storage devices or equipment that contains it, such as destroying a hard drive or an outdated laptop with an embedded hard drive. This process is known as physical erasure.

Businesses use industrial shredders or degaussers to impair devices such as phones, laptops, hard drives, and printers. Varying levels of data protection necessitate different amounts of destruction.

Most typically employed on HDDs, degaussing applies high-intensity magnetic fields to permanently impair a device's functioning and memory storage. Any memory storage exposed to this intense magnetic field is nullified and cannot be restored. Degaussing doesn't apply to solid-state drives (SSDs) since the data isn’t stored on them magnetically.

Cryptographic erasure

Cryptographic erasure, also known as crypto erase, encrypts the entire storage device and erases the key to decrypt the data. This approach employs public-key cryptography, and the encryption algorithm must be at least 128 bits.

While the data remains on the storage device, it’s virtually impossible to decode by destroying the original key. As a result, the information becomes unrecoverable, which is an effective data sanitization strategy.

Steps involved in cryptographic erasure:

1. IT teams enable storage device encryption by default. They also provide access to the API call to the storage device to delete the key, allowing cryptographic erasure to be implemented.
2. Cryptographic erasure involves ensuring the encryption key erases the old key and replaces it with a new key, encrypting the data and rendering the previous key unrecoverable.
3. The cryptographic erasure software should generate a tamper-proof certificate, indicating that the key was correctly deleted, and provide the device details and standards employed.

Data erasure

The software-based process of securely overwriting data from any data storage device with zeros and ones on all device sections is known as data erasure. Data sanitization is achieved by overwriting the data on the storage device, rendering it unrecoverable.

This is a very reliable sanitization method since it ensures that all byte-level information is changed. It’s also feasible to create auditable reports that demonstrate that the data is properly cleaned. Compared to physical destruction, this approach benefits from not destroying the device and allowing it to be sold or reused.

Incomplete data sanitization methods

The three techniques listed above fulfill data sanitization standards; however, many others do not. These inadequate data sanitization procedures hardly make data unrecoverable. Some of these techniques are:

• Data wiping
• File shredding
• Factory reset
• Data deletion
• Reformatting
• Data destruction (without verification)

None of these solutions provide the requisite verification and certification stages for data sanitization. Consider your organization's risk tolerance when selecting a data sanitization method.

To ensure compliance with data privacy and security regulations and limit the consequences of a security breach, highly regulated businesses should opt for total data sanitization.

Data sanitization policy

Practical application of data sanitization methods can reduce the likelihood of data theft or exposure. There are numerous viable alternatives for any business to destroy data and media permanently. Companies can manage their data erasure obligations while complying with regulations with a well-laid-out data sanitization policy.

Begin by developing a data destruction policy with your data retention policy. Many data sanitization regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), have particular data preservation policies and processes requirements.

A data destruction policy ensures that information is securely removed, destroyed, or overwritten from devices and media that are no longer in use, making it difficult or impossible to retrieve vital data. Having a data destruction policy also reduces the likelihood of a data or privacy breach and the liability your business may face.

In addition to a data destruction policy, every business should have appropriate procedures documenting the process used to destroy the data and media. Most current laws that require data management policies and processes also mandate written documentation of all data retention and disposal operations. This can prove to the court that the data in question doesn’t exist.

Data sanitization standards

While data sanitization is a common practice in most disciplines, it's not universally understood at different levels of business and government. As a result, a comprehensive data sanitization strategy is essential for government work and the private sector to avoid data loss, exposing sensitive information to competitors, and divulging proprietary technology.

With the world becoming more connected, governments, businesses, and people must adhere to specific data sanitization policies to maintain data confidentiality throughout their lifespan.

SOX mandates that firms have tight records retention policies and processes but doesn’t prescribe a specific data storage type. Business executives need to implement internal controls over their information to ascertain its completeness, accuracy, and access speed.

However, SOX requires accounting firms that audit public companies to maintain audit documentation for at least seven years after the audit is completed. Violators risk fines of up to $10 million and 20 years in jail. HIPAA legislation focuses on protecting electronic personal health information.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) special publication 800-88 also gives thorough guidelines on sanitizing data storage media depending on an organization's classification of data confidentiality for information. It is compatible with important aspects of another widely used NIST standard, SP 800-53.

Applications of data sanitization

Data sanitization strategies are used for various business activities such as privacy-preserving data mining, association rule hiding, and blockchain-based secure information exchange. These activities require transmitting and analyzing massive databases, including private information. Before making personal information available online, it must be sanitized to avoid exposing sensitive data. Data sanitization enhances and maintains privacy in the dataset even as it is examined.

Privacy-preserving data mining

Privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM) is mining data while protecting the privacy of sensitive information. Data mining involves examining massive databases to discover new knowledge and draw conclusions. PPDM has several applications and is essential in transmitting or using important data sets containing sensitive information. Data sanitization is crucial in PPDM since private datasets must be cleaned before analysis.

A key goal of PPDM is to maintain user privacy while allowing developers to use user information thoroughly. Many PPDM measures directly change the datasets, creating a new version that makes the original unrecoverable. It completely erases any sensitive data and makes it inaccessible to attackers.

Association rule mining

Rule-based PPDM is one form of data sanitization that uses preset computer algorithms to clean datasets. Association rule masking is a data sanitization technique used for transactional databases. Transactional databases are a type of data storage for recording business transactions during regular operations. 

Shipping payments, credit card payments, and sales orders are a few examples of association rule mining. This source examines fifty-four different data sanitization methods and gives four preliminary results of its patterns.

Blockchain-based secure information sharing

Browser-based cloud storage solutions rely primarily on data sanitization and are popular for data storage. Furthermore, ease of use is critical for companies and workspaces that use cloud services for collaboration and communication.

Blockchain securely stores and transmits information and data sanitization is necessary to manage this data safely and correctly. It helps people involved in supply chain management and could be valuable for those looking to optimize the supply chain process.

For example, the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) employs a safe key generation approach to securely transfer information via the blockchain protocol. The need to enhance blockchain practices is getting more pressing as the world develops and relies more on technology.

Benefits of data sanitization

Data sanitization is one of the most critical processes for businesses to consider. It completely wipes out or destroys data and makes it unrecoverable. No matter how well you think you handle your devices, there's always the possibility of a security breach. Your company could be vulnerable to devastating cyberattacks or compliance failures without data sanitization.

Here are some other benefits of data sanitization:

• Secure temporary data: Data is often restored in an offsite location during emergencies. The same is true for disaster recovery rehearsals, which generally involve actual customer data. This data must be erased from the secondary site. After restoring production systems, data admins need to wipe any data remaining on recovery drives. This can also apply to "test exercises" with real-world data.
• Ensure data hygiene: Data destruction is part of overall data management that eliminates redundant data, reducing IT expenses and the risk of data loss/theft and breaches.
• Prevent data spills: When data in any form is moved from a protected system and placed into a system that doesn’t provide the same or greater level of security as the system it was moved from, data leakage occurs. Sensitive data may be erroneously copied at this time.  That data should be permanently and verifiably wiped, not simply removed. Data sanitization techniques minimize data spillage.

Challenges of data sanitization

Internal and external audit teams may stress data center administrators to keep their operations clean, efficient, and compliant. But data sanitization isn’t an easy task. Here are some commonly seen challenges:

• Time and resource-intensive process: Setting up a data sanitization policy from scratch can be manual and time-consuming. Determining data owners and key stakeholders throughout the data lifecycle is also a hurdle.
• Inadequate knowledge: Businesses don’t train their employees enough about data sanitization regulations and their role in designing, maintaining, implementing, and complying with these policies. Most regulations aren’t broad enough to handle data sanitization during an asset’s lifetime.

Deep clean your devices

Data sanitization is a vital data management step for your IT team. A successful data sanitization process reduces the likelihood of your organization's sensitive data being stolen or compromised and improves compliance.

Can't make sense of your data? Learn how data cleaning can enhance data quality and provide more accurate, consistent, and reliable insights for data-driven decisions.