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Secure Erase Windows: First Considerations
When you (or your organization) no longer use a piece of equipment, you have several options for the future of the device. You can recycle it or sell it, ensuring that it will be useful to someone else in the future. This has obvious environmental benefits (and also economic ones, if you can sell the equipment or donate it for a tax deduction), but there are also risks.
Organizations that require high data security often destroy computers or their storage devices, putting them out of service. If an organization has a PC that contains “the nuclear launch codes,” it is clearly a better idea to destroy it than to reuse it. This is an extreme example, but it demonstrates the point: if the CEO of a large company has a PC that contains sensitive trade secrets, that organization will almost certainly want to physically destroy the computer rather than risk the data being somehow recoverable and falling into the wrong hands.
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