Perhaps in-office visit is a bit confusing, near-office visit may be more accurate. Either way, Cintas has recently launched a hard drive destruction program, an offering within their document management services arm, which until recently was mostly focused on paper document destruction and document imaging and storage. The new hard drive destruction program is an on-premise solution that destroys the drives via shredders then recycles the materials following all regulations and compliance requirements. We put the service to the test with nine 3.5" hard drives from our lab that contained all of the old StorageReview secrets and some bad sectors.
Perhaps in-office visit is a bit confusing, near-office visit may be more accurate. Either way, Cintas has recently launched a hard drive destruction program, an offering within their document management services arm, which until recently was mostly focused on paper document destruction and document imaging and storage. The new hard drive destruction program is an on-premise solution that destroys the drives via shredders then recycles the materials following all regulations and compliance requirements. We put the service to the test with nine 3.5" hard drives from our lab that contained all of the old StorageReview secrets and some bad sectors.
While nine drives is smaller than what a typical customer would shred at a time, the process is the same. Cintas schedules a time to show up at your office, data center or other location of your hard drives and shows up in a large box truck outfitted with the hard drive shredder. Each truck is operated by a pair of drive destruction experts who have had detailed background checks.
Before shredding takes place each hard drive is scanned and entered on a manifest that the customer receives at the end to validate drive destruction. The customer also receives a certificate of destruction for proof of service. Combined the documentation is sufficient for more legal and regulatory concerns when it comes to issues like housing and securing customer data, patient information (HIPPA fines can hit $250,000 and 10 years in prison per violation), and the like.
Drives are then loaded one by one into the drive shredding machine, which essentially acts like a small guillotine, slicing the drives into small chunks of debris, making any data recovery essentially impossible.
The debris is collected in containers, and customers have an opportunity to see all of their destroyed drives before the Cintas team departs.
In the end Cintas secures the drive bits and transports them to a facility for recycling which melts down all shredded components. Just like that, hard drives go from security risk to problem solved, all in a safe and secure manner.
Overall we’re very happy with the results, digging through the debris at the end validated that all platters where chopped, along with the PCBs and all other key components.
Cintas document management services operates nationwide and offers competitive prices per hard drive shredded, though volume discounts are available. Compared to the cost of losing that data though, the small price is well worth the peace of mind.
Cintas DMS Hard Drive Destruction Services
