Blancco Erasure Suite Available

Businesses now and in the future must continue to cope with exponential growth in digital information stored on PCs, laptops, servers, mass storage devices and smart phones – much of which is protected by increasingly stringent legal and industry standards, including the WEEE directive (EU), Data Protection Act (UK – ICO), Sarbanes-Oxley (US), and The Personal Information Protection Act (Japan – JPIPA). In 2009 alone, the amount of global digital information grew by 62%, creating enough gigabytes to stack DVDs from the earth to moon and back, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) of the US.

To help companies efficiently secure their electronic assets, Blancco announced the availability of its Blancco Erasure Suite, a flexible, centralized solution developed to manage large quantities of disposable assets in multiple remote locations.

"IDC predicts that while data will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 through 2020, the number of information technology (IT) professionals will increase only by a factor of 1.4; thus, comparatively small IT staffs will be challenged with thoroughly removing all information from an ever-growing number of electronic assets set for retirement and reassignment, especially in an increasingly strict global regulatory environment," said Kim Väisänen, CEO of Blancco. "This situation necessitates a powerful on-line erasure tool that centrally manages data removal for corporate IT security officers and IT asset disposal centres (ITADs), while monitoring erasure activities and authenticating reports to ensure audit trail integrity for compliance purposes."

The new Blancco Erasure Suite combines upgrades of Blancco’s trusted data erasure client software and recently introduced Management Console to create a complete solution for managing the entire data erasure process, from erasure to report retrieval and audit preparation. With the Console, a central IT staff can execute remote erasure for multiple and diverse assets through a LAN via a Web interface, as well as create flexible hierarchies to control user rights and licenses. Comprehensive reports can be viewed, modified, shared with applications, or sent via email, depending on user rights, while authentication functionality ensures reports are not altered by unauthorized sources.

"Estimates show that regulatory compliance has become a $46 billion per year industry, yet, it is a necessary part of secure business operations," continued Väisänen. "Blancco Erasure Suite supports economical and efficient inclusion of data erasure in a business‚s IT security policy by allowing central management of on-site data erasure. This is especially critical for geographically distributed businesses and data centres, where data is often unencrypted."