Most modern businesses will constantly move with the times and invest in new technologies. What this means is that quite often there will be old hard drives and digital media lying around that contain potentially sensitive and personal information. Hard drives fall under GDPR, meaning that your company is responsible for the safe and secure hard drive destruction that ensures personal data is disposed of in an effective way that meets all regulations.
Why should you destroy old hard drives?
IT destruction is an important part of the service a shredding provider offers its clients. We understand that a modern business has both physical and digital media that it needs to dispose of, and old hard drives, smartphones, and other devices hold countless types of data and information.
Utilising the expertise of a professional shredding company ensures that any sensitive information that is stored on your old hard drives is disposed of effectively, completely removing the data. This could be customer credit card information and personal details, bank account numbers and passwords of employees, and supplier information. Even if you have manually deleted information from a hard drive, you might not have completely destroyed it, so take the chance to use the professional experience of a company that knows how to ward off data thieves.
Data protection laws such as GDPR are also important. Failure to comply with data laws can lead to heavy fines and will severely damage your reputation. Damage to a brand can lead to mistrust from both loyal and potential customers, make it harder to attract investment in the future and to retain and hire top talent within your industry.
Methods of hard drive destruction
What are the most effective methods of destroying old hard drives and ensuring that all data stored on them are completely and securely removed?
Shredding
Hard drive shredding uses industrial shredders to securely destroy old hard drives and other types of digital media devices. It would not be possible for you to completely destroy a hard drive, even if you think you could just drill a hole into it or smash it up with a hammer. A professional service understands that by shredding a hard drive into the smallest pieces and mixing it with other hard drives, it would be impossible to reassemble.
Degaussing
This is a process that uses strong magnets to erase magnetic bits of information on a magnetic device. It is expensive and difficult to store degaussers to manually erase data in your business, which is why it makes sense to hire the services of a professional shredding company that offers this service. Many companies prefer a combined approach of both shredding and degaussing to offer a greater level of security.
Wiping the data
As a way of starting the process, wiping data from a hard drive using a computer is effective up to a point. Certain types of data erasing programmes can be effective in ‘shredding’ data digitally and making it difficult for criminals to access and reassemble digital data from that hard drive. When combined with other methods of data destruction this can be a good route to choose for a business with sensitive digital data.
Choosing a shredding service to destroy your old hard drives
It can be time consuming and difficult to rely on your employees to be thorough when manually destroying old documents both physically and digitally. Rather than take a chance, hiring a professional shredding service is the best way to ensure that your business is complying with data regulations and that you are removing any clutter in the offices that could be better used for proactive and productive business purposes.
Finding a shredding provider, such as Pulp, helps you to have peace of mind as a business owner that your digital media is disposed of in a timely and secure manner. No matter the type of digital and physical media that you have in your workplace, it is important that all data is looked after, this can include digital files that contain employee information, customer financial information, and other types of information that fall under GDPR and can only be stored for a pertinent period of time. As a shredding provider we offer a stellar service that looks after both your physical paper documentation and hard drives, helping you to declutter, to maintain a robust process of data destruction and an effective workplace.
