Industry Whitepaper | Healthy Paranoia

INDUSTRY

Professional Sports Team

With over 25 years of experience and over 1000 clients in the Northeast, Back Thru The Future® is one of the most capable computer recycling and secure data destruction companies in the country – period.

CHALLENGE

One of our first hard drive shredding clients was a major professional sports team that would hand deliver and witness the shredding of their obsolete hard drives at our plant based shredding facility.  They made it very clear that the owners of the team were hyper-sensitive to the privacy of their organizations information, and insisted upon the direct accountability of IT management for the secure destruction of all data media.

As our relationship developed, we were awarded their IT asset recycling business. The challenge was to convince IT management that when our field service team came to pick up their computers, we could also pick up their hard drives and other media that needed to be destroyed.

Our secure, auditable process and chain of custody transportation service was air tight, and it made perfect sense from an economic stand point to combine the recycling and secure destruction activity.  The response was always, “our jobs are more important than a few hours of our time transporting and witnessing the destruction of our hard drives.  We’ll stick to what we’re doing.”

Due to their high organizational visibility, they were constantly solicited for their electronics recycling business.  Several years ago, a competitor made them a financial offer which included sharing revenue from the resale of their obsolete computer equipment. BTTF could not compete financially with the competitor’s offer because it is our commitment not to resell computer equipment sent to our facility for the purpose of recycling.

APPROACH + OBJECTIVE

In our promotion of Best Practice, we state there is a very real data security safety net with our process because we always audit and disassemble the devices delivered to us. We never miss a hard drive or other media device that may have been accidentally left in a computer, laptop, printer, server or network unit.  When detected we have a step by step quarantine process that alerts the client to the found media before the recycling process continues.

The client stated that they were confident in their process of removing hard drives, and they never had an incident where their current recycler found any media. They would continue to use our secure destruction services, but the economics of our competitor’s offer was too attractive not to utilize.

As we added onsite mobile shredding vehicles we convinced them to use these onsite services rather than hand delivering the hard drives to our facility for shredding.  Not too long ago, while at their site for an onsite shredding event, we were asked by IT management if we could take a couple of skids of computer equipment for recycling, that they needed them removed in a hurry.  

As always, through our receiving process we inspected the incoming computer inventory and discovered several hard drives left inside devices to be recycled. We immediately isolated and quarantined both the found media device and the item we found it in, and notified the client.  At that point, we offered the alternatives of securely returning the found items, holding the items for their representative’s inspection and witnessing the destruction at our facility or entering the found items into our standard in house shredding process.

RESULTS + BENEFITS

It is our experience, no matter how tight the client’s in-house hard drive de-install process is, drives will slip through. In addition, with new solid-state storage technology entering the disposal process, it is becoming more and more difficult to identify and de-install all data storage devices.

As more solid-state storage becomes integrated into the electronics of computing and communication devices the solution or Best Practice is to destroy not only hard drives but the main circuit board or logic board of mobile devices, network devices and server units.

In this particular situation, the client was extremely thankful we caught the missed materials and chose to have their devices and hard drives returned to them via secure transportation the next day.

Our commitment to protecting our client with a rigorous inspection and secure and auditable data asset handling process helped us establish in our client’s mind that their sensitive data was in the hands of a partner they could trust.  We regained their entire IT asset disposal business.

We provide regulatory compliant IT disposal services focused on protecting our clients from the unintentional failure to follow State and Federal environmental and data privacy regulations. Our procedures and documentation have been perfected over years of involvement with developing industry standards and regulatory requirements. Our Compliance Library™ is a secure, web-based document archive that provides a comprehensive and easily accessible history of all your organization’s IT disposal activity – a necessary tool for audits and asset management.