Secure Erasure Option: Guaranteed Secure Data Destruction
Secure Erasure™ is a licensed option for SEPATON S2100® data protection appliances that delivers guaranteed, auditable erasure of data on virtual tape cartridges. With Secure Erasure, the storage administrator can schedule all or selected cartridges to be completely destroyed in a process that conforms with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines.
Simple, Secure Erasure
Many government agencies and industries are subject to stringent regulations that mandate complete, auditable destruction of designated classes of data. For example, military and intelligence agencies periodically destroy classified or sensitive information. Healthcare, financial services, and other private industries also purge systems of proprietary information and regulated types of data, such as medical records, credit card information, and intellectual property records.
The S2100 data protection appliance with Secure Erasure enables these organizations to destroy data in compliance with regulatory requirements and their in-house policies without the cost, risk, and complexity required in physical tape environments.
Cost-Saving Operational Efficiency
Secure Erasure reduces IT administrative cost by increasing productivity of IT personnel and automating time-consuming, manual tasks, such as mounting, unmounting, and removing physical tape cartridges.
Secure Erasure destroys data while leaving virtual tape cartridges reusable, saving thousands of dollars in media costs annually. In addition, with no physical tapes to destroy and dispose of, Secure Erasure enables a "greener" data center.
Fully Auditable Destruction
Many regulations require documented proof that data or entire physical cartridges have been destroyed. Providing this auditable proof in a physical tape environment requires administrators to spend hundreds of labor hours annually collecting, inventorying, and documenting tape cartridges.
Secure Erasure eliminates this costly administrative burden and the human error that may accompany it by automatically generating an audit report for each destroyed cartridge and emailing it directly to auditors - putting the data destruction status of every cartridge at their fingertips.
Continuous Capacity
Conventional tape destruction reduces the capacity of a tape library until all of the destroyed tape media is replaced. With Secure Erasure, you never have to worry about losing critical backup capacity. As data is destroyed, DeltaView Manager provides clear reporting of the cartridge status and automatically adds freed cartridge space to the capacity available for new backups.
Secure Erasure is also more flexible than other disk-based data destruction options, which require administrators to erase or degauss (demagnetize) entire disks to remove a single backup set. With Secure Erasure, administrators can erase a single cartridge or multiple cartridges as needed.
Risk Reduction
Secure Erasure reduces risk by eliminating the need to move tape cartridges to an in-house or outsourced tape destruction facility. Data destruction with Secure Erasure is an in-house, operator-initiated process that is performed directly on the S2100 appliance. It provides simple, immediate destruction of data. By keeping data on-site and destroying it immediately, it also eliminates the risk of tapes being lost, mishandled, or stolen in transit to a shredding location or while waiting for periodic shredding services.
