Mishandling digital information is more costly than ever before. In fact, the average cost to a corporation of a data breach is now nearly $4 million per instance. Of course, the more clients you have and the more records you keep, the greater the damage when your data falls into the wrong hands, both in dollars and to your reputation.

 

When it’s time to dispose of outdated or end-of-life IT equipment, you need to know that your IT recycling services provider has a secure chain of custody firmly in place for your hard disk drives and other memory devices. It would help if you also pinpointed where a specific piece of hardware is in the chain at any given moment.

 

This type of dependable oversight is what CompuCycle offers our corporate clients, whether you’re engaging our data destruction, asset recovery, or another of our IT recycling services. So you know you’re complying with all relevant privacy laws, environmental sustainability standards, and industry regulations.

 

Secure Hardware Transportation, Processing, and Disposition

 

From the time we take possession of your items until they leave our facility, our chain of custody ensures data is protected 24/7. Here’s how it works:

 

Collection: When you schedule a pickup, we send uniformed CompuCycle employees TWIC (Transportation Worker Identification Credential) certified. They will carefully inspect the items to be collected to ensure everything is accounted for and nothing unintended gets collected.

 

Transportation: We lock your hardware in secure cases and load the cases onto our branded CompuCycle trucks equipped with GPS monitoring and the capability to notify us if the doors are opened.

 

Data erasure: We process equipment in our access-controlled, 24/7 camera-monitored, and alarm-enabled facility. All equipment is scanned into our system upon arrival at the facility, and then, regardless of where it is bound, it is data sanitized to NIST 800-88 and DoD 5220.22-M data erasure standards.

 

Processing and disposition: Depending on your instructions, your hardware will then be processed in two ways: refurbished by our IT department or manually shredded and recycled.

 

  • Refurbishing: As part of our IT recycling service, we can refurbish and/or upgrade outdated computer equipment for remarketing. Once completed, refurbished items leave our facility with a serial number generated by us to track them.

 

  • Shredding: The shredding area is locked and can only be accessed by staff with the necessary authorization. Personal devices are not allowed on the processing floor, and all employees are scanned upon exiting the building.

 

We generate an electronic inventory report registering each hard drive being scanned in and then each one being shredded. You also receive a Certificate of Destruction showing the date of destruction and quantity of each item destroyed.

 

One hundred percent of the raw materials that result from shredding by our state-of-the-art industrial shredder are recycled by being sold into the marketplace to refineries and smelters. We are an R2 certified recycling company.

 

A Chain of Custody Under One Roof

 

Many recyclers won’t tell you that their facilities aren’t equipped for shredding, which means they must ship your IT equipment to a third party to be physically destroyed elsewhere. This poses significant potential problems.

 

For one, any vetting you’ve done on your recycler and its security protocols is now practically worthless because you’re leaving your data in the hands of someone else. You may not know how they handle transportation or destruction, or even who this company is!

 

What’s more, this third-party provider may not have the ability to reduce IT equipment down into raw materials. Although unlikely, this shortcoming could expose your shredded materials to data breaches if any pieces make it through the shredder sufficiently intact to be read by a knowledgeable data technician.

 

And at the very least, it could cause you to unwittingly fall short on your sustainability goals if any hazardous materials such as mercury or lead end up in a landfill.

 

At CompuCycle, we use a large Automated Recovery System equipped with specialized components that allow us to separate the steel, aluminum, copper, plastics, and circuit boards that can then be reused. We are one of the only IT recycling services providers in the state of Texas with this capability.

 

CompuCycle’s Secure ITAD Process

 

IT recycling services - CompuCycle

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