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Growing Your Business

Owning and operating a successful business is an amazingly rewarding experience. However, to stay in business long-term, you need to continuously grow your client base. To do so, you should always strive to provide exceptional customer service to your clientele. You can accomplish this task by training your salespeople well. You should also search for effective ways to advertise your business’s product or service offerings. Some wonderful places to advertise your goods or services include newspapers, magazines, your website, and the social media outlets you engage in. On this blog, I hope you will discover smart tips to help you succeed in business.

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Growing Your Business

How To Destroy Your Company's Sensitive Documents

by Claude Medina

Your business uses documents of all types. When it's time to get rid of those documents, you cannot use half measures. You also have to consider exactly what constitutes a "document" these days.

You don't just keep data on paper. You also keep it on compact discs, DVDs, tape mediums, hard disks, and in various other places. Here are a few ways to destroy that sensitive information when the time comes.

Destroying Paper

The best way to destroy paper is to cross shred it, and then recycle it. Recycling it is the environmentally friendly thing to do. It also keeps it from sitting around in your dumpster or trash bin. If you want to use extra caution, you can redact, cut out, or punch holes into the sensitive information on the paper before shredding.

Destroying Discs

CD, DVD, and other disc mediums are easy to destroy. You can use a disc shredder. Many paper shredders come with disc shredding functionality as well. You should also score the disc with something sharp, or rub the writable side of it with sand paper.

If you don't have a disc shredder, you can easily break a disc any way you see fit. The more pieces, the less chance of anyone attempting to put it back together. If the disc is a rewritable one, then you should format it, or fill it with junk files before destroying it.

Destroying Tape

If you use tape as a backup medium, then you need to take special care when destroying it. There are several options for tape:

  • Degaussing or demagnetizing it
  • Unspooling it and cutting it
  • Overwriting the data

You should actually use all of these methods to stay on the safe side.

Destroying Hard Disks

Destroying a hard drive isn't as easy as other document destruction methods. You should first format the disk. After that, you will need to zero fill or overwrite the disk.

A zero fill means you fill the disk with zeros rather than data. It's also possible to fill it with nonsense patterns as well. There are many utilities to do the zero fill. Look on your hard disk manufacturer's website.  

You can also degauss a hard drive after the rewrite. After that, you will need to physically destroy the disk. You can take the drive apart, pull the platter and scratch it, or poke holes in it.

Using a Professional Service

All of these methods of destruction are fine. But if you want to make sure the job is carried out correctly, you should contact a professional shredding service. They will have the means to physically destroy all of your sensitive hardware.

It's one thing to pound a hard drive with a hammer. It's another thing to have it go through an industrial machine that reduces it to a piece of misshapen metal. Visit http://www.mobileshred.net for more information.

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