The answer to this depends on where you define the start and end points. For example, if you are doing pickups from customer facilities do you want to track from that point or once it arrives at your own facility? Similarly, at the end of the process do you want to track to final disposition or stop at the point of issuance of a Certificate of Data Destruction?
This blog will focus on only the data erase elements not the supporting processes, ie everything that happens before and after. Much will depend on your ERP and the extent to which it provides those supporting external processes.
We will start with a simple scenario, two customers each drop off four hard drives for wiping at your facility. A point to note here, numbers are not important, it is the process that matters.
These two drop-offs bring you to the first of many 'branches' that you will have to decide on. How are you going to distinguish between each customers' hard drives? You can physically separate as in two diffent boxes but the problem with that is now you have to track the boxes, so the problem remains. Also, everything has to be separated all the time, even boxes cannot be mixed.
The solution is to take the serial number of every drive against the customer record as soon as you get it in. After that it doesn't matter, you always know who belongs to which hard drive. If you can do this depends on your ERP. but separating drives physically is a nightmare. Easy in principle but far more costly in the long run. If you capture the serials at the beginning then all tracking issues kinda go away. Now you can mix boxes and even drives, forever and not worry where each drive came from, right? Largely, yes but if the person scanning the barcode scans the batch numer by mistake you still have the problem.
The solution to this is to scan ALL of the barcodes and have AI figure out which is the serial number. No mere covering up barcodes so the wrong one is not scanned. So, just before the drive goes into the shredder, scan every barcode, take a picture then shred. Once again, have the software do the tedious and fiddly.
So now you either have two boxes of four drives or a single box with eight. It is much better to have the single box of eight. More work on the front end but it is better to capture this sooner because you are going to have to capture this at some point.
Software fits in at the very start of whatever process you chose, you're either tracking individual drive or groups of drives. If you are still doing this with a spreadsheet at any point you now have something else to track, the spreadsheet itself. Box number, customer name, how many drives and the serials, each a different file? People still do this!
Drives are going to arrive at your facility either loose or in situ, as in still in the host machine. Either way, the customer is going to want proof that the data has been erased. The machine itself may have a resale value, a laptop for example. Rip out the hard drive and shred it? If that is what the customer wants then yes. Most of the time this is not the case - customers understand value destruction too. $8 -10 to destroy or half that to wipe makes a big difference to the bean counters if a thound units are being processed.
Back to practicality. You have a thousand hard drive units come in, loose or inside a host. If the customer wants the drives destroyed, if inside a host the usual thinking is remove the hard drive and send it to the shredder. This only solves a piece of the equation. You still need to evaluate the unit, capture drive serials, have an audit trail to the shredder, shred the drive and keep records of the entire custody chain.
For the moment, let's assume that these 1000 drives are inside 1000 laptops or desktops and provided they pass testing, have a remarketing value. Ideally, you would plug 100 at a time into your local network and boot each unit from the network. This would load Recyclewipe which would recognize a laptop as being a laptop, a desktop as a desktop and so on. Recyclewipe has previously been instructed to test the screen display of a laptop but not of a desktop or server.
The system boots and the software first tests all components, memory, cpu, motherboard, network card(s), sound, video, everything and reports this back to the ERP. The software then wipes all the drives and reports those metrics back to the ERP. Lastly, the software attempts a data revovery operation (required under new R2V3 rules) and reports this bak to the ERP. In one step you now have 100 units, fully tested and fully wiped. You have the serials of every drive and host machine together with a pass or fail of any component. You don't need to scan barcodes or figure out what cpu is in each laptop. Now you can remove the drive if destined for the shredder. Any failed units are instantly identified. This will cost you $0.50 per machine.
If the drives arrive loose just plug them into an enclosure and again, boot from the network. Recyclewipe will recognise it is booting lots of loose drives and will boot to 'container' mode. This provides you with a visual gui showing each drive and a color coded status. Drives that fail for whatever reason are clearly marked in red, unhealthy drives in brown and healthy drives in green. All drives are optionally taken into stock.
In an ideal world you will want to touch a unit as few times as possible. For units with a resale value that should also include a cosmetic evaluation. Recyclewipe 'knows' what it is testing so can present the user with your predetirmined cosmetic criteria, scratched screen, worn mouse pad etc and can automatically calculate a grade based on your criteria.
All this for $0.50 per unit. Oh, and as an added bonus, your total yearly cost is a maximum of $6000. You could test and wipe an unlimited number of devices in a year and you'll still only pay a maximum of $6000.00.
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