As more businesses turn to paperless documents and storage, it’s essential to have a plan for managing e-waste. You need to protect your valuable data, but you also need to figure out how to properly dispose of electronics that you’re no longer using.
Do you have a data destruction schedule for your business? Even if you’re not bound by regulations such as HIPAA and FACTA, you still have a responsibility to your clients to protect their information and destroy it properly.
Once tax season is over, many businesses take the opportunity to review their document retention schedules and destroy hard drives and documents they no longer need. It’s a good time to do it and allows you to ensure that you’re in compliance with regulations and best practices.
Destroying a hard drive isn’t as easy as you might think. Even data on a drive that’s been severely damaged can sometimes still be retrieved. That’s a scary thought if your organization needs to destroy data in accordance with HIPAA or FACTA regulations.
Security is important for every organization. It’s common for business to have systems in place to store and destroy their important documents and data according to regulatory requirements. But, even if you’re doing everything right when it comes to document destruction, you might still be leaving yourself at risk in other ways.
What goes into destroying a computer hard drive? The truth is that the security of computer hard drive destruction is far more important than you might think. Erasing files can still leave them vulnerable to retrieval. Physically destroying your hard drives provides ultimate protection of your valuable data.
Are you taking care to properly destroy the hard drives where you store sensitive business information? A surprising number of businesses are not, and it cost them. The average business data breach in the United States costs $7.9 million dollars in lost revenue and eroded trust.
When they are kept too long or stored insecurely, your business documents and media can become more of a liability than an asset. In fact, improper destruction of data is a common mistake and it can be a costly one.
Dealing with your company’s valuable data requires care and attention. It’s your responsibility to safeguard your clients’ privacy and adhere to any regulations that apply to the storage and destruction of the data you collect.
Regardless of your industry, data breaches are a serious threat. Your data (and data you store on behalf of your clients) is vulnerable to attack. It’s your job to do whatever you can to protect it.
