Are You Destroying All of Your Confidential Information Before Disposal?

Document shredding is now a very common practice that many businesses take part in regularly. While sensitive documents require secure shredding to ensure information remains protected, have you ever considered whether your electronic data should also be destroyed?

With electronic data storage on the rise, it’s important to remember that hard drives likely contain sensitive information about your business, customers, marketing plans, budgets, and more. Without correct disposal of these hard drives, you could be leaving data at risk of exposure and theft, putting your business and your customers in a vulnerable position.

Hard drives and storage drives are amazing pieces of technology which have changed how business operates on a regular basis. They have allowed for the dramatic surge in the security of information storage, and its accessibility. But what really happens when a file is “deleted” on a hard drive? Does the information really disappear when you hit the delete button? Are you even removing any data at all?

In actuality, “deleting” a file doesn’t erase the data indefinitely. As access to knowledge regarding technology advancements increases, the ability to recover “lost” data from intact hard drives, is growing. This is what allows data recovery businesses to operate. The penalties for a disposed hard drive getting into the wrong hands could be comparable or worse to confidential documents landing in the wrong hands. Hard drives store more information than you may realize, so it’s crucial they are properly disposed.

Abraham’s On-Site Shredding Service is happy to provide hard drive destruction services in addition to our regular document shredding services. This service involves an end-of-life process that renders the hard drive unusable and all data irrecoverable. We degauss the media first which magnetically erases virtually all data on the disk, as well as destroying the control/servo track information. Our hard drive and tape degaussing equipment is fully compliant with all National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication Series 800-88. We then crush the platen in a second step. Next time you find yourself disposing of a hard drive in the Kenosha area, contact us to have it destroyed first! Call 262-877-8878!