
Business owners and government entities go extra miles to ensure complete safety of the data on hard drives and papers copies. Most companies may decide to use methods such as drilling holes or smashing hard disks as a way of hard drive destruction, but this may sometimes fail to clean the hard drive completely. Seeking document destruction services helps maintain the safety levels in your company through complete removal of confidential data from the drive.
Hard drive and paper shredding services are either on-site or off-site. In on-site data destruction, the service providers visit the facility and destroy the hard drives from the business premises. Business owners can observe the destruction process, which provides a sense of security to the clients. Offsite document destruction involves taking the hard drives to the destruction facility for shredding and complete destruction. The offsite destruction services pose a significant security risk to the company’s information due to the number of processes involved. For more information, you may find the resources at Shred-it to be useful.
Hard Drive Destruction Methods
Wiping, reformatting, erasing, and degaussing hard drives do not clean all the data from the hard drives. A hard disk destruction company uses various methods to remove data from the hard drives. Some methods may damages the hard drive completely while others provide a permanent erasure of the data without destroying the disk. Some of them include:
1) Thermal Destruction
It involves burning and melting. The heat destroys the magnetic media and the data contained on the hard drive. Document destruction companies can carry out the process either on-site or off-site. However, thermal destruction technique has adverse environmental effects.
2) Physical Techniques
Companies may have various types of machines for destroying the physical look of a hard drive. Some of the physical methods used include drilling a hole on the hard drive and bending. However, the two processes might not destroy the data leaving your business vulnerable to fraudsters. The best technique involves cutting and shredding the hard drive into pieces.
3) Use of Data Erasure Software
Software erases the data permanently leaving the hard disk undamaged. The software overwrites the hard drive strings of binary codes that clean all the data from the disk. A skilled technician should carry out the procedure to ensure complete erasure of data from the hard drive.
Conclusion
Information from a hard drive can cost a company a lot of income if it falls into the wrong hands. Therefore, business owners should take an active approach in document destruction on either paper or hard drives. Consider hiring a reputable hard drive and paper shredding service provider to ensure maximum security to the company’s data.