Beginning early next year, Rehab Recycle, a division of the Rehab Group, will begin deployment of its new national data destruction service that essentially safely destroys sensitive data on a business’s own premises.
The service, which will roll out in Dublin first, involves a hard disk degaussing unit: a machine that uses a super-powerful magnetic field to completely destroy the data by making the binary code unreadable.
Bob Rowat, general manager of Rehab Recycle, told siliconrepublic.com that many organisations such as banks have information so sensitive that they are reluctant to let it leave the premises to be destroyed and are welcoming onsite data destruction.
“Certain organisations are physically nervous about letting data outside the premises to be destroyed or wiped and we are able to provide this service for them. The decision is how important it is to an organisation: how sensitive is the information and what potential disaster could happen if it fell into the wrong hands?”
Rowat said that in light of the recent data breach by the UK Government in which the personal details of 25 million people went missing on two discs, organisations are increasingly not willing to take any risks in this way.
“Organisations have literally been waiting for us to deliver this service and many businesses like Dell have shown a lot of interest.”
When secondhand computers are passed on to charities or educational programmes, organisations want to make sure that old information is wiped completely and becomes unrecoverable, adds Rowat.
So far this year Rehab Recycle has securely wiped more than one million gigabytes of information and destroyed 50,000 hard disks at its Tallaght-based asset recovery and disposal facility.
The degaussing unit, with their powerful magnetic fields, have just been imported from the US, says Rowat, and are most likely the only machines of their kind in Ireland right now.
By Marie Boran
