As more and more IT departments recognize the need to destroy their old hard drives we receive regular requests to provide project quotes for shredding quantities of hard drives.
The first question we ask is what type of inventory audit do they need. In many cases the prospect has not given a lot of thought to the inventory issue. It is very important to realize that the act of shredding a hard drive is the final point in the life cycle of a data asset. Today the concept of having a cradle to grave data asset control system is not just a good data security practice it is also a regulatory required data privacy practice for certain industries.
There are two distinct data asset lifecycle partitions.
- The time that the data asset is an active component of your online IT system. During this period there are software packages that allow you to keep tabs on where the asset is and how it’s performing.
- The time in which the data asset has been removed from your online system and becomes a physical asset that must be handled and tracked manually. This is where most data asset control systems unravel.
The transition between the automated online record keeping and the manual handling disposal process must be seamless or you lose the regulatory require chain of possession record. We highly recommend that our clients utilize preprinted barcode labels for the manual disposal asset tracking system. There are several very important advantages to this approach.
Once the data asset has been inventoried and properly secured you are ready to introduce a secure destruction vendor capable of establishing and maintaining the auditable records required to establish the required chain of possession to the final disposal of the data asset.
The entire data asset disposal process must be a smooth continuum of the asset’s life cycle management process.
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