Disposal of computer equipment without taking appropriate measures to sanitize the data stored on the system's media can lead to the disclosure of sensitive information, embarrassment, costly investigations, bad publicity, and other negative consequences. Businesses and Federal agencies must establish policies and procedures to ensure the proper destruction of sensitive information.

Data destruction or data wipes should always be performed on all data-storing hardware before disposal. Common items that require this kind of maintenance include:

• hard drives, portable hard drives, external drives
• flash drives / thumb drives
• backup tapes / backup disks
• CDs or DVDs which contain sensitive data

• The Privacy Act of 1974
• The Computer Security Act of 1987
• The Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act of 1988
• The Electronic Communications Privacy Act
• The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
• The Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA)

YourTech ensures data security compliance on computer equipment by using one of two techniques for data sanitation: overwriting and destruction.

YourTech erases hard drive data to Department of Defense standards. The DoD 5220-22M Standard States: Non-Removable Rigid Disks" or hard drives must be sanitized for reuse by "Overwriting all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and verify." The DoD 5220.22-M sanitization method was originally defined by the US National Industrial Security Program (NISP) in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM) and is one of the most common sanitization methods used in data destruction software.

Whether an organization recycles their IT equipment, resells it, or redeploys it; removal and destruction of the storage media is the most complete way to ensure that all data is non-retrievable. YourTech can completely destroy hard drives, thumb drives, and other hardware that contains sensitive data, ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other applicable laws within your organization.