Onsite hard drive and data media shredding

Onsite shredding and degaussing

We highly recommend that data media sanitization take place at the customer’s location. In the healthcare and financial industries and under many State data privacy regulations a loss during transportation of an unencrypted device would trigger a regulatory mandated “Data Breach Notification”. Data Breach notifications are expensive but the resulting bad publicity can be many times more harmful to an organization.  Providing NIST approved onsite degaussing or onsite shredding completely eliminates this business risk.

Secure tape shredding 

There are legal and security risks involved with every magnetic tape stored at your facility, yet many organizations have closets or even rooms full of old media. Because older tapes are unreadable on current technology, many back up tapes can no longer be recovered without incurring large expenses.  

Disposing of magnetic tape requires that all recorded data is destroyed and that the data sanitization process meets with both your internal data security needs and regulatory data privacy requirements. Regulatory data privacy regulations require that you follow NIST Special Publication 800-88 “Guidelines for Media Sanitization” NIST approves both tape degaussing and tape shredding as acceptable data sanitization methods. 

“Managing legacy data is the most important thing an organization can do to reduce risk and cost associated with electronic data.” 
Source: Anne Kershaw, A. Kershaw PC / Attorneys & Consultants 

Degaussing or shredding tape 

Degaussing is typically done onsite utilizing a portable degausser for smaller quantities of tapes usually less than 500. Portable degaussers can process 3 to 4 tapes or hard drives per minute. Thus, degaussing is not a practical alternative for large quantities of tapes. Mobile shred trucks can process 1000+ tapes per hour. The large shredders at Back Thru The Future can process 4000 plus per hour. 

Onsite or offsite tape sanitization 

For large quantities of 10,000 + tapes, secure transportation to a plant based shredding facility is the least expensive option. Since onsite shredding may take more than a day for large quantities, shredding at a Back Thru The Future facility can be done in less than a day, minimizing your operational disruption. With effective inventory chain of possession handling practices, offsite shredding provides a secure handling process. 

Final tape disposal 

There is no recycling value to old magnetic tape. If your disposal vendor claims to recycle old tapes free of charge, they are reusing them. This allows for the possibility of your recorded information being exposed. Even reused will eventually either be land filled or incinerated. Your best disposal alternative is that it be done with a licensed recycling facility that provides a legally valid environmental compliance document for the final disposal. 

Onsite IT asset inventory control – onsite data asset removal

30 years of IT asset disposal experience has proven that the point of pick-up of obsolete assets is the best place to establish inventory control

The disposal of IT assets are often collected in an ad hoc basis. In many cases, asset identification and reconciliation with accounting records doesn’t occur onsite because of the lack of manpower and space. Data assets are mixed with non data assets and creates potentially serious data security control problems.

Our onsite asset inventory audit services are designed to establish essential chain of possession records and create an asset disposal inventory control mechanism by organizing, packaging and manifesting asset control groups. While onsite, we will remove data bearing media such as hard drives and solid state storage from your IT assets identifying the units that the data media was removed from and the serial numbers of the data media removed.  The data media will be packaged separately in secure manifested containers, ready for transfer or destruction.

We can provide both onsite and plant based NIST approved data destruction.  Our vehicles are specially designed as both secure GPS tracked transport vehicles as well as high volume electronic shredding vehicles.

As a US EPA and NJ DEP licensed electronic shredding business and a NAID AAA certified secure data destruction business we have the unique ability to provide both a legally valid environmental compliance certificate as well as legally recognized data destruction certification for your IT Asset disposal projects.

A preprinted barcode label is attached to the to-be disposed of data asset and the barcode information is appended to your asset inventory record. At this point the barcode label becomes the “chain of possession” identifier. The purpose of using a preprinted barcode label is to eliminate any possible confusion associated to the multiple manufacture barcode labels found on data assets. It also identifies the data asset as belonging to a particular disposal project.

The barcode labeled drives are immediately placed in secure containers that protect against unauthorized removal of the drives from the disposal process and container manifests are created. At this point the data assets are ready for the sanitization process.