Inside a Hard Drive Shredding Service
What do you do with your outdated hard drives? Do you stockpile them in a closet or toss them in the trash? Neither option is secure. Data doesn’t just disappear. Unless it’s physically destroyed, data lingers forever, increasing your company’s exposure to identity theft and privacy breach liability. In this blog, we take you behind the scenes of a hard drive shredding service.
Pickup and Collection
You can never be too careful when disposing of hard drives and other digital storage devices. One drive can store millions of confidential documents. If it falls into the wrong hands, your company may never recover from the legal and financial repercussions.
A hard drive shredding service applies a rigorous security protocol that begins with the secure collection of your media. Uniformed and background-screened shredding technicians adhere to a documented chain of custody procedure. They never leave your hard drives unattended. During collection, the bar code of each device is scanned and immediately transferred to a secure, GPS-tracked vehicle for transport to the shredding plant.
Destruction
Deleting data from a digital storage device isn’t enough. With rudimentary skills and easily-obtainable software, thieves can extract valuable personally identifiable information (PII) from an “erased” device. At the shredding plant, specialized media shredding equipment destroys your hard drives. The shredder applies 20,000 pounds of conical force onto the platter of the drive. This massive force crushes the hard disk’s spindle, forms ripples in the platter and cuts it into pieces, rendering all stored data irrecoverable. A Certificate of Destruction listing each shredded hard drive and the corresponding serial number is provided at the completion of your shredding project.
Post Shred Recycling
Every year, millions of tons of electronic waste are dumped in landfills. Electronics recycling is integral to a hard drive shredding service, preventing environmental pollution and health hazards. After destruction, the remaining pieces are recycled with a raw material extraction process to produce new metal and plastic products. You receive a “Certificate of Recycle” for your records.
As you can see, a hard drive shredding service gives your data the protection it deserves.
For more information about hard drive shredding, please call us at 615-242-9600 or complete the form on this page.
Richards & Richards offers document destruction and hard drive shredding services for businesses throughout Nashville.
