Survey: Sensitive Data Stays Put at Half of All Businesses

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.