Following the Mandates Protects You & Your Business

While most business owners know the importance of proper retention and destruction of confidential records and how critical remaining compliant is, many don’t realize that HIPAA laws and other privacy mandates extend to hard drives and other devices used by the company. The fact is, many companies, when implementing their privacy policies, don’t factor in the information that is stored on hard drives and the implications of this data being obtained by an outside source. Take a look:

Hard Drives Store Highly Sensitive Data

To be clear, when discussing hard drives it’s important to note that the term does not just include those that are inside your business’s network computers—every device has a hard drive built in and therefore is capable of storing information. These devices include:

• USB Drives
• Zip and floppy disks
• CDs
• DVDs
• SCSI drives
• External drives
• CPUs
• Cell Phones
• Tablets
• X-rays
• Gaming consoles
• Microfilm and microfiche
• Magnetic tapes
• RAM and Rom based storage
• Backup tapes
• Personnel Badges

HIPAA Compliant Destruction

Just as your company has policies in place for the destruction of outdated paperwork and files, those devices that are no longer being used must be destroyed within compliance guidelines to protect your business. Hard Drives, even after they’ve been wiped clean, still contain bits of information that hackers are experts at obtaining. So while you may think that you’ve deleted all the records and data from old devices in your company, the fact is unless they are properly destroyed, you are leaving yourself at risk. Giving away old company computers or recycling them is not advisable. Identity thieves and hackers have very sophisticated methods of gaining access to information stored on hard drives and only need the smallest bit of data to breach your company’s records.

All Points Mobile Shredding provides secure and permanent hard drive destruction and is a NAID AAA certified organization. This certification means that we adhere to the highest standards accepted by the information destruction industry. Our family-owned business is dedicated to helping you protect your company from security breaches by providing full service shredding and destruction. Give us a call today or fill out this form to learn how we can serve you.