With how much of our daily lives occurs online, data security has become a top priority for organizations and businesses alike. The sheer amount of sensitive information stored on electronic devices calls for strict measures to protect this data from unauthorized access and misuse. One essential aspect of data security is data destruction. But why is data destruction important?

On June 3, Supervisor Ed Romaine (left) was at the William Floyd Middle School in Moriches for the Town of Brookhaven’s Spring Recycling event in Council District 6. Every year, the Town holds two recycling events in each Council District that include paper shredding, e-waste disposal and a supervised prescription drug drop-off program.

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.

January 28th marks Data Privacy Day, an annual event held in order to promote both data privacy and best practices for protecting your critical data.
So this is an excellent time to get ahead of the risks that compromised data can present to a business.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, commonly known now as HIPAA, has provided patients with the privacy they need but it’s also been a challenge and disruption to the way medical records are maintained and managed from an IT perspective. Patient authorizations are required for any data sharing and breaches of HIPAA can have big financial applications to healthcare providers and networks. In fact, millions upon millions of dollars have been paid out in HIPAA-related breach of privacy cases. This extends to your ITAD practices as well. It’s key to have the right partner to help you navigate.

Virtually every company has the need to eliminate and recycle electronic waste. And while shredding unnecessary old or archived files is usually the answer, it isn’t always the right answer. It can shred your budget too. While on the surface shredding may seem like the simpler, cheaper alternative to wiping data, that’s simply not always the case. The machines can be cost-prohibitive and ultimately, more costly than wiping software. 

Proper data management is the key to protecting the security of your company’s sensitive information. In fact, companies are responsible for generating, storing, and securing sensitive data such as financial information, transactions, personally identifiable information, medical information, and more. In addition to the moral & logical responsibility of protecting this information, companies also have a legal obligation to keep sensitive data secure. 

Corporate Compliance regulations vary by industry, but they are crucial in developing your company’s risk management policy. One of the biggest risks of exposure for your company is through poor data destruction polices. Simply destroying IT assets or throwing them out with the trash is not an option, particularly if your organization deals with sensitive data. 

Technology has allowed many companies to work in the current COVID-19 climate while keeping their employees and families safe at home. Remote working is a flexible solution for many organizations because it allows employees to be online and in-network while they do not need to commute or expose themselves unnecessarily to others, however remote working does raise some questions about how a company’s IT Asset Disposition plan should work. 

Due to the hard work and advocacy by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), the Department of Homeland Security designated scrap yards such as Arrow Scrap as essential businesses on March 25, 2020.