Behold: The Hard Drive Apocalypse

Network Computer Pros goes to great lengths to make sure your data stays secure.

Is it possible that there’s anyone left who doesn’t know what a data breach is? It’s about as likely as finding people who actually haven’t been impacted by one. Equifax estimates that 143 million people could be affected by theirs. Verizon’s breach over the summer may affect up to 14 million people. And it was recently discovered that not just some—but all of Yahoo’s accounts were hacked. That’s about 3 billion.

Here’s the thing about data breaches, though. Hackers don’t just steal information only by making their way into your secure system. An alarming amount of data is pulled off of old hard drives that companies discard when they upgrade to new equipment. Big deal if you delete the data on those drives? Do you really think it can’t be retrieved?

Nothing less than destruction

Hackers can retrieve data from erased hard drives. They can even get it from the somewhat damaged hard drive you thought you made useless by whacking it with a hammer. There’s only one way to guarantee that data can never be retrieved from a discarded hard drive, and that’s to make it unrecoverable by destroying it.

It’s not just damaging to your reputation and the ire of customers you risk bringing on if you throw away a hard drive with data that gets retrieved and falls into the wrong hands. HIPAA and other federal rules regulate data storage media disposal. Your business could end up paying thousands of dollars in fines if there’s a data breach caused by this type of negligence.

How do you ensure that your data is irretrievable and that your company is in regulatory compliance? Those hard drives must be physically destroyed using a high-security media destroyer. And yes, there are actually professionally certified data destruction companies that will destroy data storage media.

Where do those old hard drives live in the meantime?

Data destruction is an expensive undertaking, making sense to avoid doing it on a piecemeal basis. This means that companies have to securely store the drives, which they usually leave in the computer. Somewhere in the building, a closet or storage room is serving as a computer burial ground.

Unfortunately, this is neither safe nor compliant with federal regulations for destroying data covered under these rules.

Network Computer Pros makes it a no-brainer for you, and we also make it free.

It’s part of our flat-fee service. We’ll collect and store all of the discarded hard drives that we replace. These drives are securely stockpiled, never leaving our possession, until we bring in a professional data destruction company to render the hardware into literal shreds. The rest of the computer pieces are sent away to be recycled.

This is an expensive and time-consuming process; the most recent session pictured here took nine hours to render over 1,300 hard drives into a destructed state that’s acceptable under compliance regulations.

Best of all for our clients, it’s simply part of our flat-fee services. It’s a standard operating procedure. How does your IT management service handle it?