How Businesses Should Prepare For Electronic Recycling?

For businesses, it is very important to regularly clear electronic devices. Not recycling them timely can reduce the security levels. Many businesses that have not increased the security levels are facing issues related to a data breach. Storage devices like hard drives and pen drives have a certain age. After completion of this age, individuals and companies should follow the end of life hardware destruction. Deleting the data simply is definitely not the solution. With access to these hard drives, hackers can easily recover data. Thus, contacting an electronic recycling provider is important to ensure 100% removal of data.

Why Electronic Recycling services are important?

Electronic recycling services are important because of many reasons. The companies not following strict data protection rules have faced many breaches in the past. Many cybercriminals hack the data of clients and leak them on the dark web. Thus, the companies have to lose clients. Electronic recycling services help in the 100% removal of data. Many electronic recyclers provide certificates of data removal. Accordingly, they promise 100% removal of data. However, it is important to consider the mode of data deletion.

The best way to prepare for corporate electronic recycling is by removing data permanently. For this, professionals have to understand the efficient methods available. Also, they need to choose between primary and secondary storage devices. Let's understand and differentiate between the methods of data sanitization:

Deleting data normally: Many people use this method for data deletion. Removing data once is also called sanitization. When the files are deleted, they're still present in the deep memory of hard drives. The files appear to be deleted but with physical access to the hard drives, anyone can recover those files. Many applications are available for recovering the files successfully. Thus, businesses following this method of data deletion are directly comprising the files. Let's understand how the mechanism of file deletion works:

When a file is deleted, the pointers storing the address are deleted. These pointers are responsible for locating and fetching the files. So, now the address connection is lost and the file is present in the deep core memory. Access to this part of memory is not available without special software. This software has scripts to access the core memory and recover files.

Now to permanently delete the file, the only way is to overwrite the data multiple times. For example, to delete a data block permanently, it is important to store more data there. After multiple attempts, the old data is not available and the new one overwrites. This way the old data is made permanently unavailable. Now, the clear disadvantages of using this method are:

Time-consuming

A dedicated team is required

Degaussing: Degaussing is a method used for permanently deleting the data quickly. However, the method is costly in comparison to the method discussed above. Strong magnetic fields are used in this method to delete the data. Also, the procedure cannot be completed anywhere. A special place is needed for conducting this task. Once a strong magnetic field is applied to the hard drives, the composition is disturbed and the data is deleted. Also, now these hard drives cannot be used again. The only option of throwing them or recycling them is available. However, this method is only applied to the storage devices affected by magnetic fields.

Crushing: Crushing is the easiest method if the company is interested in permanently throwing the electronic devices. In this method, all the hard drives are destroyed by the crusher. Accordingly, using magnetic fields, the components are separated and are further used. Obviously, in the end, the data is not recovered as the storage devices are crushed into pieces.