It’s all in a day’s work: Save 40 hours and Thousands of dollars

Guest post by Aubrey Muhlach
Global Marketing Manager – Security
Seagate Technology

What do you store on your computer? Personal bank documents, social security
numbers, photos from your freshman year at college – not exactly what you’d want
floating around for just anyone to see. How about in the cloud? – Emailed receipts,
bank information, retirement planning, company roadmaps, sensitive files – again
not information you’d prefer to publically share.

To securely erase this data from your drive you have a couple of options – execute
a drive overwrite or crush the drive. Drive overwrites can take up to 13 hours on
3TB drives and it’s typically recommended you overwrite the drive at least three
times to make sure the data is fully removed – that’s 40+ hours just to delete a single
drive! Even after all of that work it’s not guaranteed that data is removed from the
drive. By crushing or degaussing a drive you can spend $5 per drive to ensure data
is not longer retrievable. With 50,000 drive leaving the data center daily that can
become costly – plus it doesn’t guarantee data is safe from the time it leaves your
data center to the time it reaches a shredder.

What if you could permanently, securely, quickly erase all of the data on your
drive in a matter of seconds – no matter the capacity of your drive? By leveraging
encrypting drives customers can now quickly, securely dispose of drives in a matter
of seconds AND repurpose those drives for redeployment. With media sanitization
guidelines under review with NIST, cryptographically erasing your drive is
becoming more recognized as a validated and secure way to retire your drives while
saving you hours of time and money.

Celebrating security this week is one of the world’s largest and most renound
security shows, RSA. Come visit us this week (February 25-28) at the San Francisco
based show at booth #555 for your chance to win a FIPS validated external drive
and learn more about Seagate Secure offerings. Not in San Francisco? Click here to
learn more about Seagate’s security offerings.

Do you live in a data privacy hot zone?

Why stockpiling hard drives screams opportunity for secure data erasure