Interconnectivity has become ubiquitous in organizations today, and institutions are doing all they can to protect their data. However, data becomes stale over time and must be discarded to create room for more information. Therefore, what do you do to stale data? While organizations can format or erase data from their hard drives, these methods do not destroy the data. If a hard drive falls in the wrong people's hands, they could easily retrieve most of the data. Thus, hard drive destruction services are critical since they guarantee data protection by ensuring the complete destruction of hard drives. This article highlights tips for choosing the right hard-drive destruction services.

Certificate of Destruction

Under the relevant data protection laws, an organization must ensure that clients' data does not fall into the wrong hands. Failure to comply with the statures attract severe consequences. As such, companies must show proof of hard drive destruction as part of compliance. You need to obtain a certificate of destruction, which is a formal document proving that a service provider has disposed of your hard drives securely. Therefore, you should only work with a company that offers a certificate of destruction at the end of a hard drive disposal exercise.

On-Site and Off-Site Services

The most secure way of destroying hard drives and sensitive information is shredding. However, some service providers collect hard drives from a client and slice them off-site, while others do it on-site. If you handle highly sensitive information such as patients' health history, there is nothing wrong with expressing concern over the off-site destruction of hard drives. Therefore, working with a service provider that only offers off-site hard drive shredding will not alleviate your concerns. Your best bet is choosing a firm that offers on-site shredding as part of their services. This way, you can keep track of everything that happens to your hard drives throughout the destruction process.

Industrial-Grade Shredders

Shredding is a general term used in the data destruction industry. Therefore, businesses should carefully choose the type of hard drive shredding company they work with because shred size determines the security of sensitive information. For instance, recovering data from large chunks of shredded hard drives is easy with the right equipment. Only industrial-grade shredders shred your hard drives into tiny bits that make data retrieval impossible.

For more information about destroying your data, contact a hard-drive destruction services provider in your area.