Media Sanitation: Ensuring Secure Data Disposal


When updating equipment, shuffling employees, changing users, or disposing of outdated sensitive material, large organizations often need to ensure sensitive or personally identifiable information is completely removed from a device before it is resold or reused by another employee. Media sanitation involves securely erasing or destroying data stored on various media devices to ensure that sensitive information cannot be accessed after it is destroyed. Various storage media devices that require secure data erasure might include hard drives, solid-state drives, USB drives, and optical media. When organizations fail to ensure secure data removal, sensitive information can be unintentionally retrieved from devices. Private information could be used to cause harm to the company by revealing trade secrets or harm to other individuals with personal information stored on the device.

Media sanitation should never be confused with reformatting a device. Formatting cannot ensure secure data removal. While formatting is often used after media sanitation, formatting focuses on preparing a storage medium for data storage by organizing it for the operating system's use. Similar to when one formats a document, the data remains even though the visual structure changes. Formatting usually only modifies the file system structures and marks the storage space as available for use, but the actual data remains intact until it is overwritten. When organizations only implement formatting procedures on their devices, sensitive information left on devices from prior users presents an enormous security risk as the data can be recovered. 

Organizations create specific policies that dictate the appropriate method of sanitation. Devices needing secure data disposal can be either cleared or purged. The choice between clearing and purging depends on various factors, such as, the sensitivity of the data, the level of security required to access the data, and legal, regulatory, or compliance requirements. Clearing involves overwriting the sensitive data with random, unimportant data. Purging involves destroying the data structure, often through physical destruction or erasing the information with a powerful magnet through a process called degaussing, so that it cannot be retrieved from a device.

Parting and reselling devices requires media sanitation to ensure that all personally identifiable information will be erased from the device before it is resold. For a device to be considered clean, all of the bits must be set to 0. While formatting enables a device to store new data, it does not remove the old data from the device. Media sanitation must be performed in addition to formatting to guarantee the complete removal of the previously stored data before new data can be stored on the device. To ensure data security and user privacy, organizations must implement policies that outline procedures for media sanitation and formatting before devices are distributed to new users or discarded in the garbage.

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