California’s new CCPA law is predicted to make a significant impact on companies and how they handle people’s personal information.
Following GDPR in 2018, CCPA will bring businesses in California more in line with European standards of data protection for the first time, providing the state with new powers to impose fines on businesses that fail to adopt the new data law into their architecture.
Businesses that are especially at risk include suppliers of hosting and cloud services as well as organizations that hold medical records. With personal information such as patient data, addresses, phone numbers and other sensitive details stored in datacenters and servers across California, businesses have to step up their data protection procedures to make sure that security remains a top priority to minimize the potential fallout from a data breach which could easily arise from misconfigurations.
With increasing demand for cloud computing, companies also have to update systems and remove faulty hardware and failed hard drives more frequently. Businesses of all sizes are also frequently disposing of old hard drives, and sometimes selling these older components online. During this process, businesses remain vulnerable as removing damaged hard drives doesn’t prevent information from being recovered at a later stage. Data recovery can take place long after a hard drive has been disposed of, even if it has a defect and new software can’t be installed on the disk itself.
In a recent study, it was discovered that old hard drives sold on eBay still contained personal information and corporate data that hadn’t been erased. Email messages, archived internal employee data and shipping manifests were also found on SSD hard drives and this information could be recovered easily.
In order for data to be completely removed, software alone cannot fully erase a hard drive. It is simply written over with a new layer leaving the previous set of data and all the files left on the disk. For businesses and organizations, data removal is essential especially when their old hard drives are being removed and either sold or recycled. At this stage of removal, there is still a significant risk that data can be re-discovered, and even harvested by others.
For a hard drive to be erased, a degausser can be used to magnetically wipe a disk clean. This guarantees that all the data, and even the previous versions of operating systems get removed. There are different types of degaussers that can be used depending on how many drives a business needs to process before they are recycled.