What’s Important to You?
Part of the process when it comes to choosing your recycling vendor (Download our free white paper, “Choosing a Technology Recycling Vendor in 5 Steps”) is to decide what’s important to you and your business as it pertains to your recycling vendor.
Let’s break that down.
For most businesses, data security should be your number one priority. Why? Because any employee information, student information, banking, employee records, health records, patient data, research and development, or client information that goes public could be devastating for you and your business.
The absolute, #1, foolproof method to ensure data security is to shred the drives that contain any data.
The other option is having your hard drives erased. This presents a challenge for Solid State drives, which require a special erasure process, or any drives that are damaged because the data erasure may not work and the damage can prohibit any testing.
So why would anyone have their hard drives erased if it’s not a foolproof way to ensure data security? Because recyclers who erase (sometimes called “wipe”) the hard drives will then install a new operating system and resell the equipment as “Refurbished”. The resale value can offset the cost of picking up the equipment and recycling the less valuable items.
This option might be good for businesses that aren’t concerned with data security and they have large quantities of relatively new computers with the same configuration.
Except, very few computers don’t have some form of private data on them. Login info, networking info, passwords, and proprietary data all exists on hard drives.
So what’s important to you? Your job? Your company? Your business reputation? Your customers?
If it’s any of those things, shred your hard drives.
