Remove and recycle

International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management

ISSN: 1741-0401

Article publication date: 1 January 2005

355

Citation

(2005), "Remove and recycle", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 54 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2005.07954aab.002

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Remove and recycle

A recent report published on the BBC web site indicated that less than 25 per cent of old computers sold or given away by companies have had data removed from them securely.

Maxitech.biz, the not-for-profit IT recycling company, recently conducted a survey of 400 public and private sector organisations which confirmed that, in more than 90 per cent of cases, sensitive data was only held on servers and not on workstations. On average, organizations had 20 workstations to one server.

However, companies need to identify which machines contain sensitive data and ensure that the data is rendered unrecoverable. Peter Paduh, Managing Director of Maxitech.biz says:

This is in fact easier than it sounds. Any responsible IT recycling company will provide this service to their clients and remove data, to the required standard, from machines that require secure data removal. There are also several inexpensive software tools that IT Managers can use to do this before sending their machines for donation, re-sale or recycling.

Maxitech.biz technicians permanently remove data from hard drives using software tools that comply with governmental defense standards for data removal. This standard is set by the US Department of Defense called DoD 5220.22-M and requires that all storable locations on hard drives or other storage devices are overwritten several times with zeros and random characters before verifying that no data is recoverable.

Further information about responsible recycling and the WEEE Directive can be found at www.maxitech.biz

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