Data Security: Why Your Company Should Consider Hard Drive Destruction

Your business is easier than ever, thanks to technology that allows you to digitalize documents and communicate via email and various live meeting platforms. You can save all that data to a hard drive and run a search on it when you need to find information. It’s much easier than keeping everything in paper files and having to read everything to find what you need.

However, convenience comes with a price.

Businesses are held to a high standard of protecting their customers’ digital data. But, what to do with old computers and their hard drives? Once you migrate that data to the new computer and hard drive, you no longer need the old one, and it just takes up space.

Hard drive shredding is the perfect answer.

Data Security & Employees Working Remote

With much of your workforce working from home, the workplace has fewer employees in the office, which means that computers are sitting around, thus leaving your data vulnerable to identity theft. Anyone could walk in and copy or email data without anyone knowing, especially if those computers are not password-protected. They could even walk out with the computers.

Data security in the workplace isn’t just protecting the digital data – you have to protect the physical housing for the data – the hard drives, computers, phones, tablets, CDs, DVDs, and SD cards.

What Is Hard Drive Destruction?

Data security has become a hot topic. Every employer should invest more into securing data from digital hacking and from physical theft. When you are done with a computer, shredding the hard drive ensures no data is stolen.

Degaussing and other programs to wipe data do not always get all of the data, especially if you use the wrong program for the type of hard drive you have. Even if you erase a hard drive several times, good hackers can still get information from them.

A hard drive shredder cuts the platters into many small pieces. There is no way to put the drive back together, and the pieces are too small for anyone to try to retrieve information from. If you try to drill a hard drive, you’d have to drill hundreds of holes to keep anyone from getting pieces of information.

The point of drilling a hard drive or smashing it is to make it so the platters won’t turn. But someone who is handy with tools could take the drive apart and put the platters into another drive. Instead of risking your data, shred the drives.

Shredding Old Computers

While many of your employees are out, it’s a great time to reorganize and clean the office. Not only will you accommodate employees and encourage safe social distancing, but you’ll get rid of anything that could cause a data breach.

Go through files and get rid of those you no longer have to keep. If you have any digital media storage devices, you can shred them, too, including shredding old computers.

Laws and regulations determine how long you need to keep the files. Keeping them longer could lead to digital hoarding, which is a significant data security breach.

Contact Carolina Shred

Contact Carolina Shred to discuss your shredding needs. We can provide shred boxes for files and digital media, we can do one-time shredding, or you can drop your files and hard drives off at our office.

We’ll give you a certificate of destruction when we shred everything, so you have proof of data security. Regardless of the amount of data you have, we can create a schedule to help you keep your office clean.