These days, businesses are held accountable for keeping their data safe, including safe and secure data destruction. Regardless of the business’ size, a time comes when data is old and should therefore be completely and irretrievably destroyed.
Some industries have set up compliance standards that ensure that their companies delete their confidential data in a specific way. However, suppose your business doesn’t have to meet the industry standards to delete their confidential data. In that case, it’s still crucial to ensure that all your devices are properly disposed of, with all the data destroyed or deleted.
But what does “properly destroy” mean? Here, think about disposing of paper documents, but some businesses “shred” devices too. There are some onsite shredding companies that “shreds” electronic devices.
Here are some of the right ways of properly and permanently destroying your confidential business data.
Overwriting
Apart from shredding, you can overwrite your confidential data. It is often called “seroing” since all the confidential data is completely written off, making it impossible to retrieve or access any information. Once the overwriting is complete, even file recovery utilities cannot recover or access the device’s confidential information.
The disadvantage of overwriting data is that several passes are required for the data to be completely overwritten for high-security data. You can also see a “shadow” of the confidential data on the disk if an electron microscope is used. Imagine this as writing on a paper. If you are writing on several paper sheets, you can find some impressions of your writing on the next sheet of paper below. Meaning that some hackers and cybercriminals may be able to extract confidential information.
Degaussing
You could use the degaussing process to wipe data from a device with magnetic storage. The degaussing technique uses a high-powered magnet to interrupt the device’s magnetic field, effectively destring all the confidential data stored on the digital device.
It is a fast and safe way of destroying huge amounts of data. Although it is good, it is often very difficult to see if all the data has completely been destroyed on the electronic device. If you plan to reuse the electronic device after destroying its data, this is not a good method.
Incineration
It is also another method of destroying data on your electronic device. The data storage devices are smelted or smelted to oblivion. However, it is very costly.
Physical Shredding
It is a fast, efficient and secure way of destroying confidential data. It is the act of physically destroying documents or electronic devices such as tablets, optical drivers, laptops, smartphones, USB drives, and many more. During the shredding process, the devices are shredded into small pieces of 2 millimetres or even smaller. It is often very effective with high-security data.
Data Erasing Software
It is one of the simplest ways of permanently erasing data from flash discs and hard drives. However, it takes a lot of time to erase data from an electronic device, and at times, it is impossible to access some hard drive sectors.
