Safe Harbor Express

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 IT 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: 

Web Vectors by Vecteezy

Choose your services:

  • Container size and lock
  • Inventory Audit details
  • On or Offsite shredding
  • Frequency of Pickups 

 

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 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. 


 

Electronic data discovery protection for the legal industry 

The SHE process also provides valuable litigation protection. Whenever you destroy data you must be concerned with “spoliation of evidence” charges. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, governing litigation-based electronic data discovery procedures, requires you to maintain auditable proof of following a formal records retention policy that provides for automatic destruction of obsolete business records.  This is essential to qualify for the “Safe Harbor Data Destruction” exemption from the risk of court sanctions for failing to implement a “litigation hold”. Our SHE service provides this evidence and actually derives its name from this exemption. 

SHE is in full compliance with the American Records Management Association (ARMA) guidelines for the destruction of electronic records. Back Thru The Future was a member of the ARMA committee that established these guidelines. 

History 

Our experience in with many large law firms and litigation services firms as clients has provided us with specialized insight about the importance of regularly scheduled data destruction events. Any type of data destruction, including hard drive shredding, can be impacted by litigation and electronic data discovery requirements. Accumulating business records that can legally be destroyed is a potentially expensive practice. Obsolete hard drives represent copies of business records and from a legal records management stand point should be destroyed as soon as possible. In a litigation scenario, courts require a “litigation hold” on all relevant data destruction activity. We have had large clients with thousands of hard drives in storage because of those litigation hold requirements. Failure to implement a litigation hold can result in court sanctions and even jail.

However, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) governing electronic data discovery requirements, specifically identify a “safe harbor” data destruction procedure that protects you from court sanctions.

If your data destruction activity is part of an automated records retention system you are granted a “safe harbor” exemption.

Annual prescheduled hard drive data destruction services qualify for this exemption. With this significant legal advantage of prescheduled destruction activity versus as needed activity, Back Thru The Future® introduced our annual Safe Harbor Express® (SHE) secure data destruction agreement.  

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.