When Internal, Confidential, or Restricted Use data is no longer required for business purposes, it must be disposed of securely—in a way that prevents it from being read or used again. Identity theft or theft of valuable University information can be the result when sensitive information falls into the wrong hands. Electronic data can be difficult to destroy completely. Hard disk drives, USB storage devices, solid-state memory cards, portable disk drives, floppy diskettes, and data storage tapes are all examples of media from which the data is not completely removed when normal deletion methods are used.

You can prevent serious losses by taking advantage of our data wipe and media destruction services.

Benefits

When data is securely deleted from media or the media itself is destroyed, sensitive information is protected from inadvertent loss or unauthorized access.

Key Features

• NIST 800.88 defines three methods for securely erasing data from media storage, depending on your requirements.  These methods are referred to as ‘Clear’, ‘Purge and ‘Destroy’.
  • Clear – Logical techniques are applied to sanitize data in all storage locations for protection against simple non-invasive data recovery techniques; typically applied through the standard Read and Write commands to the storage device, such as by rewriting with a new value or using a menu option to reset the device to the factory state (where rewriting is not supported).
  • Purge – Physical or logical techniques applied that render target data recovery infeasible using more advanced techniques. Cryptographic Erase (CE) is an advanced sanitization technique that can be used in some situations when data is encrypted as it is stored on media. With CE, media sanitization is performed by sanitizing the cryptographic keys used to encrypt the data, as opposed to sanitizing the storage locations on media containing the encrypted data itself.
  • Destroy – Renders target data recovery infeasible using physical techniques and also renders the media incapable of storing data afterward. “Destroy” can include shredding, incinerating, pulverizing, melting, and other physical techniques.

  If you need to dispose of media storage that was used to store Restricted Use Data, we recommend that the media be Destroyed.  If the media needs to be re-used, there are complaint purge options, if the media supports it.  Please contact us for more information.

What to Expect

This service is available upon request.

Requirements

None

Getting Started

• Contact us to request this service