3 Reasons You Might Not Want You IT Staff to Do Data Sanitization

Having your own people handle something as risky as data erasure sounds like the best way to ensure peace of mind. After all, the members of your IT staff were hand selected by your company for their expertise and reliability, and many of them have served your company at an extremely high level of competence for years. That’s why this advice might seem somewhat counterintuitive: Consider outsourcing data erasure to a reliable, certified vendor. Why remove your trusted IT staff from the data sanitization process? Three reasons:

1. Your IT team members already have their hands full

To do it right, which means doing it a manner that won’t expose your company to the risk of a data breach, data erasure takes time and dedication. The data sanitization procedure is one time when you should discourage multitasking. To avoid a data breach, not only does the sanitization have to be completed correctly, it needs to be verified, and the IT assets need to be tracked throughout the process so that one isn’t misplaced or misdirected. It’s worth noting that the majority of data breaches are trigged by assets that aren’t connected to a company’s network. Your IT people most likely already have their schedules full with the tasks required to support and manage your IT infrastructure. At any time during the data erasure process, they could be pulled away to put out a fire somewhere else, and that’s when something might be overlooked. A failed or incomplete wipe, or a system inadverntantly gets moved the wiped stack when it actually was not completed.

2. Proper data erasure takes space

Space is at a premium in most business environments. Piling up laptops to be sanitized, postponing a data center closure until the servers can be sanitized, or filling up a warehouse with old desktops all takes up valuable real estate, costs money, and disrupts business. If you’re concerned about assets leaving your facilities before they have been sanitized, some ITAD vendors can bring mobile units to your locations and perform data erasure there. Or, if you choose a vendor that has received leading certification like AAA certification from the NAID (National Association for Information Destruction), you can count on a documented process that will keep track of your assets from when they leave your facilities to when the data is erased.

3. Your IT staff isn’t trained on the latest best practices

Advancements in data sanitization come at a rapid pace as data storage technologies evolve. For example, do your staff members know how to safely remove data from solid-state drives (SSD)? Are they up-to-date on the latest standards like NIST 800-88? Do they have a QA process in place to ensure the erasure is successful? If not, and if your team doesn’t have the time to stay current with the latest developments in data erasure, it might be time to consider an outsourced solution. Vendors with NAID AAA certification have proven they know the latest techniques for data erasure.

Learn nine other best practices for data sanitization by downloading our free guide, “10 Myths About IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) Data Erasure.”