With the advent of the digital era, creating, maintaining, handling the company records has become very easy. It is fast and effective, and there is no need to carry and store data physically anymore. With just a few clicks on your computer, you can get access to any data you need.
Nevertheless, there are always risks involved in saving data electronically. It imposes a threat to the privacy and reputation of your business. That’s why it is crucial to handle your company data adequately. In case you are recycling your electronic waste, ensure that you use proper data disposal techniques.
Privacy Security Risk
Are you aware?
There is a range of federal and state legislation currently mandating businesses to maintain and delete their data properly to protect workers and customers. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountancy Act, The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Sarbanes Oxley Act, and the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, and many more govern the disposal or destruction of data. Non-compliance to these may lead to legal action against the company.
This makes it essential for businesses to know the various methods that help in data destruction. The experts at CJD E-Cycling describe that there are three categories of data destruction. These are clearing, degauss, and physical destruction methods.
Clearing
In clearing techniques, you can clear the data by using various programmatic software-based methods. It focuses on destroying the information contained inside the storage device. The benefit of this method is that you can reuse the device after the data has been erased.
Degaussing
For the situation that your organization is wrecking all the data from obsolete hard drives or other gadgets, degaussing is a great choice. It eradicates all the data by deleting all the magnetic database files of the device.
It is vital to save your critical data before using the process of degaussing as it makes the hard drive unusable. It additionally works for tapes, reels, diskettes, and cartridge tapes.
Nonetheless, it is possible that some data may not get destroyed completely that is why it is not always successful. To ensure that all data gets completely erased, it is advisable to use powerful degaussing magnets.
Physical Destruction
Physical data destruction can also be used to sabotage the storage media. Harming a hard drive’s platter could make the data unreadable.
You should be able to successfully destroy the components that hold data by destroying the storage media. In the physical destruction, there are many techniques utilized by companies, such as melting, disc shredding, disintegration, or some other physical harm that makes the media unusable. Besides, it also helps in generating e-waste.
Every person in the organization should be familiar with these methods. The company should also set up a data destruction policy for the best interest of all individuals associated with the company. Taking into account the fact that different data is handled by different employees they must realize what to do consistently with the data.
To overcome the risk of privacy protection, this policy for data destruction must be part of the corporate procedure of every company. A periodic audit of data destruction policy can help in its better implementation.
