While your first inclination might be to hire a professional or a company to destroy data, you first have to have your in-house process buttoned up. You need to know your end goals, what your company stores locally vs what is stored on your hard drives. Provided you have a staff, you also need to know what’s on their phones, laptops, desktops or tablets. What about customer or patient data? Also, if you regularly print, those files existed somewhere before.

Know what to protect and who you are protecting. 

Though the customers may change, the process is always equally important. For medical practices, patient data must be protected to ensure you are HIPPA compliant. An old hard drive full of data that gets tossed out before being properly wiped can be a disaster for them and you. If you’re a restaurant or retailer, and regularly conduct credit card transactions, any data you don’t destroy according to protocol can open up your customers to data theft, identity theft, or even credit card fraud if it gets in the wrong hands. For financial institutions, you and your employees are privy to SSNs, addresses, and account numbers. And what about your employees? If you process payroll, you have all their critical info, and you don’t want a data breach to impact company culture. Improper data destruction can cost time, money, and even cost you customers, patients, or employees.

The necessary steps to proper data destruction.

There are multiple steps to eliminating old data for good. Degaussing is using magnets to get rid of data on hard drives or other external storage devices. Shredding is exactly what it sounds like – putting larger devices or electronics in an industrial shredder so it’s gone for good.

If you still do need to call in the professional, there are experts like our team at Arrow Scrap who can take the pain out of data destruction and do it affordably, effectively, and according to compliance.