IT Asset Management Group In On-Site Data Erasure Service

IT Asset Management Group (ITAMG) announced their service offering: the on-site data erasure program.

With increasing regulations in the financial, healthcare and human services industries, along with the necessity to protect proprietary information across all industries, companies must take every step available to protect their companies from IP leaks. ITAMG’s on-site data erasure service ensures confidential data on HDDs is securely destroyed.

When HDDs have residual value HDD wiping is the perfect choice for data destruction. ITAMG utilizes a software solution that writes multiple passes of binary code rendering the data on the HDD unrecoverable. This software also identifies drives with mechanical defects, bad sectors or that cannot otherwise be fully erased. In this case these drives are physically shredded and recycled. The reporting feature of software erasure includes HDD and machine serial numbers, conditions of equipment, the success or failure of erasure, the time and date of wiping and the amount of passes on each drive. A certification of destruction is also provided.

The benefits of on-site data erasure are numerous: the heads of IT departments can now visually see, on-site at their firm, the information from the drives being wiped clean, for higher level of security and record. The reporting feature provides a record of useful data in case of an audit. Employee man hours are dedicated to needed tasks within their job scope rather than spending valuable time on determining how to handle data destruction for obsolete HDDs.

Along with the on-site data erasure, ITAMG also provides the Mobile Shredder Solution Service as another on-site data destruction method, providing an irreversible solution to data destruction. On-site media shredding is the proper choice when equipment is defective or no longer has any value. ITAMG brings the mobile shredder on-site to a client’s location and all specified media is destroyed at the business location witnessed by one or more employees. This process also provides firms with security. The mobile shredding unit was custom designed in accordance with the Department of Defense (DOD) 5220.22M to physically destroy HDDs, as well as DLT Tapes, medical films, cell phones, PDAs, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, floppy disks.

Off-site services in both data erasure and HDD shredding are offered through ITAMG as well. In both cases the HDDs are transported back to the ITAMG facility to complete the wiping or shredding.

In the Guidelines for Media Sanitization, NIST 800-88, methods for data destruction are discussed. Stated in the document: "With the use of increasingly sophisticated encryption, an attacker wishing to gain access to an organization’s sensitive information is forced to look outside the system itself for that information. One avenue of attack is the recovery of supposedly deleted data from media. These residual data may allow unauthorized individuals to reconstruct data and thereby gain access to sensitive information. Sanitization can be used to thwart this attack by ensuring that deleted data cannot be easily recovered."

All data destruction processes at ITAMG provide this type of sanitization.