By: When eWEEK comes out with its end-of-the-year data center/storage trends story next month, one of those trends will be something called "data retirement."
Not data deletion or data reduction, data erasure, data destroying or anything similar. Data and files can somehow reappear from all of those practices, but data retirement really does excise the unwanted/unneeded stuff forever from storage.
In any case, a new Kroll Ontrack global survey released Nov. 17 on data wiping practices found less than half of businesses regularly deploy a method of erasing sensitive data from old computers and hard drives.
Of the 49 percent of businesses that systematically deploy some sort of policied data erasure, 75 percent do not delete data securely, Kroll said. This leaves most organizations highly susceptible to data breaches, which hit businesses at least once a year, according to another Kroll study - the 2010 Kroll Ontrack Annual ESI Trends Survey.
For more, read the eWeek article Half of All Businesses Never Erase Sensitive Data: Survey.
