Disk Data Eradication Service — DoD Standard

Customer Highlight

In the name of risk mitigation one prominent financial services company stored “out-of-service” disk drives indefinitely in secure rooms in multiple data centers across the country.

These drives, many of which have residual economic value, contain data that simply can’t be allowed out of the building. As such, this customer not only had to forego the value of the drives (easily recoverable by returning the drives to the disk system vendor) but had to go to the added expense of having the drives physically destroyed on-site.

PeakData not only demonstrated how to securely erase the data from the drives (and certify the work drive-bydrive) but set up a process at multiple data centers around the country to do the work on an ongoing basis.

The result—a process that is totally secure and significantly less costly than before. In fact, recouping the economic value of the disk drives pays for the disk eradication process several times over saving an estimated $1 million per year.

Don’t Erase — Eradicate

To the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Clearing Standard (DOD 5220.22-M, DOD 5220.22-M ECE) and the Department of Energy Clearing, Sanitization and Destruction Standard (M 205.1-2)

Did you know that...

Every disk drive that leaves your control is a ticking time bomb that could cost you millions if it is misplaced?
Every drive or piece of media is your responsibility, essentially forever, regardless of which third party has taken physical possession?
You can protect yourself from litigation, regulatory fines and customer notification expenses and do so cost-effectively, without disrupting your ongoing IT operations?

Today, an increasing number of regulatory requirements that govern the protection of personal information (e.g., health records, financial statements, credit/debit card information, social security numbers, etc.) are causing companies to continually reexamine how they protect information from getting out of their control.

One area that has been overlooked by a number of companies is the security of data stored on magnetic disk. Many may not consider this to be an issue because they don’t think in terms of disk-based data leaving the premises. However, consider the rapid turnover of technology as leases expire. Add to that the regularity of hard disk failures within disk arrays (an admittedly “quiet” occurrence because of RAID data protection) and disk data “departures” become an almost daily event.

Companies sensitive to the problem of data remaining on an individual HDD or a disk subsystem when it leaves the physical security of a data center are faced with the dilemma of how to properly eradicate data in the most cost-effective manner.

Who’s Reading Your Old Disk Drives — Overview

PeakData’s Disk Data Eradication Service provides complete eradication of data from hard disk drives, protecting a company’s hard-earned reputation and trustworthiness by preventing confidential information from falling into the wrong hands. Simple approaches that promise to wipe or erase disks are not up to the task.

PeakData’s software-based technology ensures secure eradication and provides the detailed reporting required to meet today’s state and local government and industry regulatory compliance requirements, customer and employee privacy legislation, and security mandates. As a result customers are insulated exposure to legal liabilities or loss of corporate assets. Key benefits include:

On-site service delivery with no impact to production operations; or, off-site at one of PeakData’s secure, state-of-the-art facilities
Eradication of data using overwriting to a predefined standard, from 1 to n passes, in every bit position and on every track in varying patterns
All hard disk drive types are supported: mainframe or open systems; RAID or JBOD; enterprise, midrange, or desktop; fibre channel, SCSI, SAS, SATA, ATA/IDE
Fully configurable to meet any applicable standard, including the U.S. Department of Defense Clearing Standard (DOD 5220.22-M, DOD 5220.22-M ECE) and the Department of Energy Clearing, Sanitization and Destruction Standard (M 205.1-2)