Wednesday 13 March 2013

Responsible Destruction of Sensitive Documents and Computer Files

By Mark Nolan


Any commercial enterprise possesses many private records, e.g., customer personal information, national data, financial records, trade secrets, or any other materials which must be kept confidential no matter what.

Information like this occasionally must be permanently erased. This is because it may be taking up space, causing a mess, or maybe even because of industry law. But remember that the data must be discarded securely due to its sensitive nature. You must ensure that the information never leaves your possession, even when it's going into the rubbish.

Getting rid of your sensitive papers shouldn't be too much of a challenge. At least if you've got a shredder. Cross-cut and micro-cut shredders are the best for destroying the pages while offering you the utmost piece of mind by slicing and dicing them into very small pieces and strips, but even a regular strip-cut shredder will cut them into narrow strips.

There are alternatives to shredding the documents yourself that can still grant you certainty of confidentiality. Some companies will remove your unwanted private files and dispose of them securely, for a fee. Or, if you're low on funds and can't afford an electric shredder, just use the old-fashioned burning method. But make sure that if you do, then you do so safely, otherwise you might have files you didn't want destroyed consumed by the flames of the office fire you sparked.

In addition to written documents, people typically have sensitive content on their computers. The need for privacy here is just as important, and like how you can't throw a private paper in the bin, you can't just delete a file from your computer, even using the shift key while doing so, when you need to have a guarantee that nobody will ever see it again. This is because computer savvy people can still sometimes manage to find data from a discarded drive even though its user thought they successfully deleted it. The simple delete process is not always foolproof, and deleted digital information often leaves a print or a trace behind.

You have varying approaches for how you want to go about wasting the drives safely. You can digitally erase your storage medium, or destroy it, or both. This will be the more sure-fire way to keep the records safe.

In order to physically destroy the privileged information that may still reside on drives and CDs, you can smash them apart, scuff their surfaces, and make holes in important locations on the drive tracks themselves. More holes are always better than less holes. Make sure that no professional will ever be able to recover what secrets were once there. Make it so they would have to be crazy to even try.

For devices like computer hard drives, memory sticks, storage cards and the like, digital shredders are a handy tool for completely clearing them. Offices which frequently have these items to "shred" ought to have such a digital shredder on hand. It can easily destroy computer files forever by breaking apart the internal structure and wrecking the magnetic parts on the devices where they reside, in order to make sure that all your sensitive information is duly protected.




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