Preventing Corporate Espionage with Hard Drive Shredding

You might not realize how much confidential information your organization keeps on its hard drives. Even seemingly innocuous data like invoices, pay stubs, and contact lists contain private information that you don’t want leaking to anyone outside your company.

To maintain the security of your customers, employees, and business associates, you need proper hard drive shredding. Shredding hard drives prevents data from ever being recovered, ensuring that corporate espionage can’t target your computers after disposal.

Why Your Organization Needs Hard Drive Shredding

When you delete a file from your computer, it’s far from gone. Even someone with only a rudimentary knowledge of file recovery could retrieve it with access to the hard drive. More carefully handled information can be recovered by an expert in the field.

Because of this, businesses cannot simply throw their old computers in the trash. Anyone who retrieves that hard drive from the trash could gain access to the current files stored on it and potentially all the files that ever were.

That could be your organization’s competitors. Depending on the scale and field of your business, corporate espionage could be a significant concern. A competitor could have access to your client information and other important trade secrets with an old hard drive.

Even if not directly stolen by a competitor, a third party could leak confidential information. This could include your organization’s highly guarded methods, practices, designs, or other top-secret information that only gives you a competitive edge if nobody else knows it.

Hard Drive Shredding Keeps Your Data Private

Hard drive shredding is just what it sounds like; physically shredding the hard drive to ensure that data cannot be recovered. It is not simply a complete deletion or wiping of data. It is breaking up the hard drive, so it can never be reassembled and read.

Hard drive shredding delivers the highest level of data security for your organization. Now there’s no chance that competitors or other parties can go through your trash to recover your data. Even if they could track down the hard drive, it is now a pulverized pile of scrap metal.

That might sound like a drastic step to ensure data protection. It’s entirely warranted in the world of today, where the theft of private information is a major criminal industry that utilizes both physical and digital means to retrieve data.

Private information on your employees and clients stored on hard drives can be used to initiate phishing scams or other types of identity fraud. When this happens, they’re at considerable risk, and your organization can lose its long-standing reputation after such a breach.

Protect Your Organization’s Privacy

SEAM offers comprehensive hard drive wiping and shredding that meets NIST standards for any of your digital privacy concerns. We also have a full suite of paper document shredding services, along with asset remarketing and recycling programs. SEAM is the top choice in asset management for South Dakota, so contact us today for a consultation.