The advent of digital storage solutions has made lives easier for millions of organisations around the world. It is no longer essential for them to store paper copies of important documents that occupy expensive office space. By maintaining all documents digitally, they can not only save space and money, but also ensure quick access to these documents for staffs and customers.
Technology keeps improving all the time and a time comes when businesses shift to a new hardware. This is the time when safe hard drive destruction becomes a necessity for them. Throwing them away is not an option because you don’t want your leftover data to be retrieved by dumpster-diving burglars. This is why a growing number of businesses are now investing in safe destruction and recycling of their old computer hard drives.
If you have still not thought about this, here are a few reasons why you should seriously consider destroying your old and outdated hard drives before disposing them.
- Safeguarding personal information is the foremost reason for destroying hard drives. Please remember that your workers, clients, business partners, vendors, and many others have entrusted you with their sensitive information and keeping them private is your responsibility. Any data breach may have severe consequences for anyone doing business with you. Moreover, your own business data can also be stolen and misused in many different ways. Therefore, keeping sensitive information safe is in everyone’s best interests.
- Ensuring safety of sensitive data belonging to your business stakeholders is not just your ethical responsibility. Every country has its own privacy rules to keep consumers safe from misuse of their personal information. As a business owner, it is mandatory for you to adhere to these privacy standards. Businesses failing to maintain these standards may have to face financial penalties or even legal sanctions.
- Finally, incidents of data breaches or identity theft can cause long-term damage to a business by tarnishing its reputation. Following such incidents, a business might lose its clients, vendors, and even employees. On the other hand, by implementing proper measures to protect sensitive data, a business can very easily build trust and reputation.
How to Destroy Hard Drives
There are many ways to destroy old computer hard drives. However, all of them are not at all recommended. Shredding is undoubtedly the most effective, convenient, and safe way to get rid of unused hard drives.
- Drilling is a quick way to destroy hard drives, but this DIY method can be quite dangerous as it involves the use of hand drills, hammers, or nail guns. Also, this is not a practical option for destroying many hard drives at a time.
- Hard drives can also be destroyed by dousing them in some corrosive chemical. This method, however, is extremely dangerous and has a negative impact on the environment.
- Degaussing is another method that involves using a powerful magnetic force to change the magnetic direction of the drive. Though this method is safe and effective, degaussers are very expensive and require some technical knowhow to use them.
- Shredding is the most popular method for destroying hard drives because they are extremely efficient, safe to use, and not too expensive.
- Disintegrators can be used for this purpose by organisations that are very large and need to destroy a huge quantity of highly sensitive digital storage devices.
At Mastershred, we have a stunning range of shredders as well as disintegrators suitable for all sizes of organisations. Please contact us today to discuss your hard drive destruction requirements.