Very few items have such high liability for owners as tape and hard disk storage media. Whether it is company secrets, personal information, medical information, credit card transactions or financial data, information is a hot commodity and the vast majority of it by far is stored on some type of magnetic media. One hard drive could contain more than $10 million in fines for a variety of privacy and ethics laws! Information that is critical to the operation of our infrastructure such as power, traffic and phone could be compromised by simple theft of an inoperable hard drive. Stolen personal information for sale is already a mega billion dollar industry.
There are two fool-proof ways to eliminate hard disk and tape data, incineration and degaussing. Incineration subjects magnetic media to over 2,000º C which returns the magnetic field to zero and vaporizes much of the drive leaving only raw metals. In the United States, heavy incineration for metals and smelting operations have almost ceased for environmental reasons.
The one true solution is to degauss. A degausser applies a magnetic force far greater than the read/write heads to eliminate magnetic data. The degausser is not a new tool, it has evolved and kept up with the technological advances of magnetic media. It was used mostly in the early days to recycle expensive tape for re-use. The only non-destructive method for erasing “Top Secret” data is degaussing. Because of this, it has also withstood the test of time forensically. No government, corporation or individual has breached this form of disposal.
A degausser with sufficient strength and field orientation will eliminate all of the magnetic domains of the drive or tape resulting in a disk platter that is void of the deepest magnetic patterns, the servo tracks.
VS Security Product’s degaussers and destroyers are approved and used by range from security agencies and defence organizations, to universities, hospitals and computer departments. They provide the widest range of data erasure machines available,that ensure total data erasure of highly sensitive, classified material. All their products are manufactured, serviced, tested and approved by NSA, DOD and the UK National Cyber Security Centre, NCSC, NIST, CE
Who Recommends Hard Drive Degaussing?
As part of their guidelines for the sanitization of magnetic media degaussing is recommended by the following organizations: National Institute of Standards & Technology, Department of Defense, Government Security Organizations. The above degaussers are designed to help you comply with the following Government Mandates that require destruction of sensitive information stored on Hard Drives and Tapes before there disposal.
• PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry) Data Security Standard
• PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act)
• NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Guidelines for Media Sanitization NIST SP 800-88
• NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Guidelines for Media Sanitization NIST SP 800-36
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
• HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act)
• California SB-1386
• IRS-1075
• CJIS
Who uses the DataGauss?
• Banks • IT and ITES • Defense • E- Waste Recyclers • Corporate
For more information on data security product please visit: www.degaussers.in
