Data Destruction
Expert & Certified Data Destruction For London Businesses | Creative IT
Expert data destruction for confidential, financial or private data stored on IT equipment: fully certified, compliant and fast to prevent unauthorised access and fraud.
What is data destruction?
Making data unreadable, either by eliminating customers’ records or deleting data that is longer needed, is an important process when it comes to information security.
Whether the data is stored on a hard drive, a SSD or a server, there are three main ways to ensure that the data is no longer accessible on the storage media:
– Overwriting, the process of overwriting old information with new data making it difficult to locate or recover.
– Degaussing, the process of eliminating magnetic field and destroying the storage device at the same time, making it impossible to recover any information.
– Physical destruction which includes disk shredding, disk crushing or disk melting.
If none of these methods of destruction are chosen, encryption is the way to go as data won’t be accessed without the correct encryption key.
These solutions all have their advantages and disadvantages and choosing one over the other or deciding for more than one to destroy confidential data depends on the level of destruction required and whether the data destruction has to be certified for compliance purposes.
There are a number of situations when data needs to be properly destroyed including when changing service providers, migrating from an on-premise infrastructure to the cloud, stopping a service or a product and when upgrading, decommissioning or scrapping IT equipment. And simply pressing the delete key is not enough.
What are the risks of undestroyed data?
Cybercrime now costs $ 600 billion a year worldwide, a figure rising due, in part, to the growth of hacking skills. Criminal activities are more efficient, less risky, more profitable and easier than ever. A big part of information security is therefore to be able to dispose of confidential or private information or intellectual property in the correct manner.
Businesses cannot afford to overlook how and why data is destroyed when it is no longer needed. Failure to do so can lead to the information falling into the wrong hands and being used for fraudulent or criminal purposes and the risk of getting hefty fines and losing customers. In addition, the right for customers to be forgotten has to be respected and may mean deleting their information from your system.
Better data management can give companies a competitive advantage. So, when storing past financial statements, personal records of past employees, lease records, contract copies, clients’ database and much more, secured destruction is the key.
Why does your company need certified data destruction?
Data protection and robust privacy policies are key to organisations who need to be compliant with the latest data protection legislation.
Under new data protection laws, businesses are no longer allowed to store old data that is no longer needed and are responsible for destroying sensitive data. Having a consistent data destruction policy followed by everyone within your company at all times is vital.
The first important part of a data destruction policy is the classification of the information – whether it is confidential trade information or customers’ private information or other documents that have no value – and which type of data can be removed.
When implementing data destruction policy, you can decide which level of destruction is appropriate for your company’s situation and whether it requires a certification in order to be compliant.
How to carry out data destruction to achieve 100% reliability?
Creative IT, the experts of sensitive data destruction in London, offers businesses to securely erase data across their every IT asset, including USB drives, large datacentres, virtual cloud environments and selected files and folders in live environments. The tools we use and certified worldwide and come with a 100% tamper-proof audit trail and erasure reports.
The benefits of coming to Creative IT for your data destruction needs include full compliance with data erasure requirements as well as risk reduction and increase security for your organisation.