Data Center FAQs

What happens to data bearing assets? How do I know data is destroyed?

This is an important question and should be carefully considered. Most data centers require data to be destroyed on-site.  This will typically be achieved by removing hard drives and having them destroyed by degaussing, crushing or shredding. SLS offers these services, which support magnetic drives and tapes and solid state drives. Degaussing and crushing work well for small projects. We send our shredding truck on-site for large jobs. They have the capacity to shred thousands of drives and tapes per day.  NIST 800-88 r1, which provides guidance for data destruction in North America dictates smaller shred size for solid state drives to ensure all data is destroyed.

In addition to the method used to destroy data, equally important is how technicians systematically handle drives and assets as they are performing data destruction services.  Many data centers want us to record hard drive serial numbers and perform a parent/child match of the parent asset and child hard drive and provide a report while on-site, as our work is performed. It is important that no hard drive is skipped during the process and that all information regarding serial numbers are captured accurately.

For confirmation of accurate inventory counts and complete data destruction, data center managers will typically require these reports:

Certificates of Data Destruction

This certificate confirms destruction of data for all storage media, noting media serial number, date and method of data destruction

Reconciliation Report

A physical inventory is performed on all serialized assets being decommissioned by barcoding each asset’s serial number. This information is uploaded to a database which automatically compares a data center provided asset list with the barcoded physical inventory of the serialized assets. This report will flag discrepancies between manifest and actual inventories. Discrepancies are resolved prior to any equipment being removed from the data center.

Asset Report

A listing all assets decommissioned, including data bearing assets.