Safe Harbor Express Service
Being regulatory compliant is your responsibility.
Making you regulatory compliant is our business.
What is Safe Harbor Express (SHE)?
Back Thru The Future’s Safe Harbor Express (SHE) is a one, two or three year contracted and prescheduled IT asset disposal service. It is a turnkey solution for the environmentally regulated recycling of your electronics and/or the shredding of your electronic storage devices and media. The length of your agreement provides significant budgetary savings versus individual project pricing.
Safe Harbor Express fulfills all regulatory state, federal and industry environmental and data privacy requirements (HIPAA, GLBA, PCI, R2). It provides auditable chain of possession requirements of stored sensitive data for the entire information disposal process.
How it Works:
Choose your services:
- Container size and lock
- Inventory Audit details
- On or Offsite shredding
- Timing and frequency of pick up (you are not locked into the schedule)
What we provide:
Secure containers
Based upon your needs, we select a secure container size and establish a destruction schedule. Containers are available in several sizes and pickup schedules. They are available with or without top slot and with a keyed lock.
Onsite inventory audit and control services
This service establishes a baseline for asset accounting and tracking, secure chain of possession and environmental sustainability reporting.
We identify your assets and tag them. Based upon your specifications we sort the assets into inventory categories and provide the accompanying manifests.
Shredding services
Sometimes physical security concerns call for onsite shredding. Clients with onsite shredding will have all their media shred at their location.
Offsite shredding occurs after the inventory is completed. The container of media will then be locked and sealed. The secured container will be taken directly for immediate destruction at our NJ DEP licensed electronic recycling facility for the legally required recycling and disposal.
Auditable certification and records management
Data destruction certification and environmental compliance certification are provided and stored in our “Compliance Library” cloud-based document archive. You are provided with password protected access to all of these records which include an annual “totalizer” management report providing Y-T-D utilization statistics.
Employee training
Both federal and state data privacy regulations require that you provide annual “Best Practices” training to employees who handle personally sensitive information. Back Thru The Future provides this training as part of our SHE service.
For new SHE clients we provide training as part of our “on boarding process” and again when we deliver your first secure containers.
For existing customers, we provide webinar video conference training sessions through out the year. We normally schedule your annual event during the annual SHE contract renewal process.
We provide a certificate for the successful completion of training with the names of the employees trained and the date of the training. These certificates are provided to you in digital form and we store them in your Compliance Library folder for easy review and access.
SHE Benefits
- Budget friendly – One annual payment covers multiple disposal projects eliminating numerous expenditure approvals. Because our pricing is based upon your chosen container size and not on a per unit price, differing quantities have no impact on your payment.
- Operationally friendly – We automatically remind you when your pickup is scheduled, reducing your need to constantly monitor accumulated obsolete inventory.
- Inflation protection – Your prices are protected for the contracted period.
- Shipping cost reduction – Our SHE pricing includes pick up costs. If you combine IT asset recycling pickups with the scheduled secure destruction activity, there is no transportation charge.
- Auditability – The Safe Harbor Express program is a contracted and consistent process. It provides all necessary regulatory and legal documentation.
- Legal protection – Safe Harbor Express is a court approved “litigation hold” exception.
Valuable Litigation Cost and Risk Management
If your organization is sued, courts will often require you to implement a “Litigation Hold” on the destruction of all applicable business records. Most businesses have software applications that can immediately implement this record retention process within your active electronic systems. The courts recognize your ongoing need to update your electronic systems. It provides a legal exemption to the destruction of obsolete data as it occurs in your electronic records management systems. If you destroy data in the normal course of an automated records management activity, this activity is identified as a “Safe Harbor” exemption to the “Litigation Hold” requirement.
What about data stored on data assets no longer online?
Your legal department will tell you not to destroy any offline data storage media including media awaiting disposal. We have clients with thousands of tapes and hard drives stored because of litigation hold requirements. Storage of old data media is expensive. It also represents a potential extraordinary financial risk if the courts order you to recover data stored on the old media. A data recovery effort on just a few tapes or hard drives can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Litigation defense attorneys will tell you that one of the most effective ways to minimize litigation discovery costs is to destroy all data as soon as you are legally permitted.
Our Safe Harbor Express (SHE) scheduled data media destruction service is named after the litigation “Safe Harbor” exemption. Our SHE service is an automatically implemented data media destruction process. Organizations that have a regularly scheduled destruction process in place have proof that the destruction was not driven by an event or litigation.
We have been providing regulatory licensed electronic recycling services for over 30 years and we were the first licensed recycler in the country to become a NAID AAA certified secure hard drive shredder. We are certified PCI compliant and we provide both HIPAA and GLBA data privacy certifications. With over 1000 clients, we have the experience, qualifications and capacity to handle any type or size electronic recycling project.
Back Thru The Future® is NAID AAA certified for the secure data destruction of hard drives for both on and off site operations. We were the first electronic recycling business in the US to receive this certification and remain the only licensed electronic recycler in the NY metro area with this certification. This is a valuable tool for documenting vendor due diligence.
Back Thru The Future® is a Federal EPA and NJ DEP licensed Universal Waste (a form of hazardous waste) Destination Facility for the recycling of consumer electronics. Hard drives, SSD and PDAs/Cell phones are identified as electronic devices. The SHE agreement includes our authorized environmental compliance certification for the regulatory required recycling of electronic devices.
100% of our client quality control surveys rate both our pre-project and
post-project communications as “Excellent”
92% of our new client quality control surveys have been returned marked “exceeded expectations”.
Our Mission is Protecting our Clients from Environmental and Data Security Liabilities
with Secure, Auditable and Compliant Recycling and Data Destruction Services.