Secure IT asset disposal made easy with KillDisk Desktop

Computers & TechnologyTechnology

  • Author James Vaughn
  • Published September 7, 2020
  • Word count 523

Retiring old computing assets is never as simple as simply discarding them in the nearest landfill or locking them away in a storage room. Aside from the environmental and waste disposal concerns, however, there's the fact that these used storage devices can contain a wealth of valuable information that you wouldn't want ending up in the wrong hands. A lot of people assume that formatting the drives is enough to get rid of the data. However, using the right software, it's very easy to recover formatted or deleted drive partitions and even recover deleted files emptied from the recycle bin. Of course, you can physically destroy the disk to such an extent that no data can ever be recovered from it, but that's not much use if you want to sell or donate your old computing assets.

Secure IT asset disposal (SITAD) is a strategy that every enterprise needs, no matter its size and industry. The fact is; every organization holds a treasure trove of valuable and potentially sensitive data on its hard disks and other information-bearing assets. This might include regulated customer data, intellectual property, trade secrets or financial information, just to name a few categories. To ensure your data storage and digital lifecycle management routines adhere to industry regulations and internal business policy, you need a structured and documented way of retiring disused assets like hard drives and other storage devices. In the enterprise environment, it's necessary to scale data sanitization across large networks of branches and systems too. That's why it helps a lot to have a hardware-based system that securely erases all your retired storage assets.

KillDisk Desktop is a customizable hardware-based solution, which can support conventional mini-tower desktop form factors, and rack units 3U and 4U. This way, you can use KillDisk Desktop as a standalone computer dedicated to secure disk wiping or as a server blade in your existing data center. All customizable hardware solutions come with the latest version of the KillDisk Industrial Software (v2.1) preinstalled. It's also possible to customize the number of hot-swappable slots for HDDs and SDDs. Support is provided for standard 3.5- and 2.5-inch drives, and you can configure between five and 25 hot-swappable slots. The latest build offers very low noise and improved power efficiency too. Optional extras include a pre-configured system control center with a wired touch screen or wireless tablet. You can also add a pre-configured laser or label printer to print certificates and disk labels outlining the disk sanitization procedures which were used.

The KillDisk Desktop software conforms to the latest globally recognized industry standards for data sanitization. It performs multiple passes over each drive to ensure that any original data is completely overwritten so that it may never be recovered. It uses the same methods standardized by the US Department of Defense. Also, with a dedicated hardware-based system, it is possible to wipe multiple drives at the same time, which is extremely valuable if you're retiring an old data center or storage area network and want to be able to safely sell or donate the old drives.

Find out more about at https://www.killdisk.com/killdesk.htm .

James Vaughn manages data governance and secure IT asset disposal for a large insurance firm.

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