To lower your business’s risk of sustaining a data breach, look no further than data sanitization. It’s a simple and effective way to protect against data breaches. Data sanitization will eliminate unnecessary data so that it can’t be accessed by an authorized user.
What Is Data Sanitization?
Data sanitization is the process of identifying and completely removing unnecessary data in a way that renders it unrecoverable. Maybe your business has data stored on computers and external storage drives, or perhaps it uses a cloud storage service. With data sanitization, you’ll need to remove data that your business no longer needs while ensuring that it can’t be recovered.
How Data Sanitization Can Protect Against Breaches
You can protect your business from data breaches by sanitizing its data. Data sanitization, of course, will remove unnecessary data. There’s no point in keeping data indefinitely. Research shows that most data records used by businesses decay at a rate of about 20% to 30% per year. In other words, up to three in 10 data records will become inaccurate or obsolete after any given year.
Keeping unnecessary data such as this won’t prove useful for your business. It will only increase your business’s risk of sustaining a data breach. Data sanitization, though, will remove unnecessary data while subsequently lowering the risk of a breach.
Data Sanitization Methods
There are different ways in which you can sanitize your business’s data. Most data sanitization methods involve more than just deleting data. To ensure that the data can’t be recovered, they require a different approach, such as clearing.
Clearing is a data sanitization method that involves overwriting data sectors. The data sectors have new data written to them, thus preventing any deleted data from being recovered from those sectors.
Purging is another common data sanitization method. There are physical and digital purging methods. Regardless, purging is designed to completely remove data from a device. The removed data can’t be recovered after it has been purged.
Destroying is classified as a data sanitization method. Devices, of course, can be physically destroyed. If your business has unnecessary data on a storage drive, you may want to destroy it. Destroying the storage drive will ensure that the data can’t be recovered.
Clearing, purging and destroying are the three most common data sanitization methods. They will render data unrecoverable so that it doesn’t pose a risk of a breach. If you’re worried about data breaches, you should consider one of these data sanitization methods for your business.