Modern businesses generate data. It doesn’t matter what the product or service is, data is a by-product. Whether it’s magnetic strip cards, employee badges, CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, or the boxes of old-school floppy discs gathering dust in storage, a business needs to think about its exposure if this data isn’t managed properly.
Think about it. A release of employee information could result in HIPPA violations, and a breach of customer data could lead to lawsuits and regulatory sanctions. That box of unlabeled media thrown in the trash could have banking or credit card information that a criminal could use to steal from the company, its vendors, and its customers. At best this is embarrassing and a loss of trust. At worst, it is a disaster.
Phiston MediaDice
The Phiston MediaDice takes all of this magnetic and optical data and pulverizes it. Government standards, specifically NSA/CSS Specification 04-02, calls for disintegrating physical media down to particles of less than 5 mm in size and 25 square mm in surface area. To give an idea of how small that is, there are 25.4 millimeters to an inch. The MediaDice surpasses that standard, reducing your media to particles of no more than 1.5 mm in size. Essentially, it is reduced to the size of grains of sand.
Why is this important? Because of advances in technology, experts have recovered fragments of data from 2 mm particles of storage media. Computer forensics has come a long way since the 1995 DoD 5220.22-m standards for erasing magnetic tape and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. In those days, the “DoD three-pass” method of sanitizing data storage was sufficient to safeguard systems.
Media sanitizing needs to be part of a company’s data retention policy. However, it should also be written into the specifications of major technology upgrades. For example, if you install a new employee badge system, recover and destroy all old badges, including blanks. If you move to new facilities, this is a perfect time to purge outdated software, cell phones, and other obsolete media storage. Finally, closing all or part of a business should include a plan for records and media destruction. This is not a time for old computer ledgers to go in the dumpster. Instead, grind it into the sand with a Blu-ray crusher like the MediaDice. To learn what media destruction system is right for you, contact us today.
