When a large corporate such as a bank or insurance company disposes of old computer equipment, one of their biggest concerns is that the information stored on those systems could be recovered and used for nefarious purposes. This is particularly true now that the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act has come into force in South Africa.
Under that legislation, it is the company’s responsibility to safeguard our personal information and to ensure that it does not fall into the hands of those who would exploit it. The only guaranteed way to avoid this is through Secure Data Destruction services, the goal of which is to make sensitive or crucial data completely unrecoverable.
Contrary to popular belief, simply deleting a file or formatting a disk drive does not necessarily get rid of the information stored on a computer. True data destruction means that it should no longer be accessed or read by an application or an operating system. And the broadly accepted way to assure that is through a physical destruction process, where the device on which the data is held is completed destroyed and fragmented.
Whether it’s a hard drive, a solid state flash drive, a mobile phone, a tablet or a GPS tracking device, Desco can ensure that the data held on that device can never, ever be recovered. Some clients require destruction to be certified and supported by video and/or photographic evidence of destruction.
The highly specialised and customised equipment used by Desco to facilitate such product destruction enables the company to shred the products down to a fine state that renders the product and brand completely unrecognisable. Desco can further separate and recover certain materials to be recycled.