Migrating your company’s data center to a cloud service provider is a great move! But like any data center project, there are multitudes of steps and obstacles to perform and overcome, and countless compliance directives to meet. One of the most stressful and resource-heavy projects is physically decommissioning old servers, storage arrays, network equipment, cables, and racks. The good news is, by hiring a certified and compliant data center decommissioning service to perform this difficult task your company will save time and valuable resources.
In fact, much of the cost of decommissioning is often recovered through the value return for the equipment, and sometimes companies actually earn money from the migration because of their valuable equipment.
Most companies are sitting on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars’ worth of data center equipment, with thousands of drives full of sensitive data. Data center managers must work with limited resources, especially tight budgets, so the task of de-installation, recycling, and data sanitization can seem insurmountable in addition to the countless quotidian tasks and smaller projects they must perform. But, for the same reason that your organization is moving to cloud servers (to put critical operations in the hands of experts who do nothing but maintain servers), you should consider letting experts who decommission dozens of data centers every year, ensure this process is done quickly and safely.
The process is straightforward, which is good news for the data center manager, but more importantly, it is secure. Properly done, data center decommissioning has a tight chain of custody where a handful of technicians arrive on-site at your data center, perform all compliant asset cataloging, de-cabling, and un-racking, load all equipment onto a secured dedicated truck, and bring the servers and other equipment directly to their warehouse without any other stops in between. Depending on company policy data destruction may be performed on-site or offsite with proper certificates of destruction. This chain of custody ensures few touches to sensitive data and equipment, and mitigates the rate of human error associated with too many people and companies stepping all over each other.
Another added level of difficulty is the corporate and government creation of new regulations and compliance points to help secure privacy and data, as well as protect the environment. Most companies do not have the systems in place internally to meet all the new regulations. However, certified white glove decommissioning companies are generally up to date with all certifications, especially for data destruction and environmental compliance, and provide certificates of data sanitization for every single drive they take.
So if you are looking to move to AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Dell, IBM, Verizon, Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, or any other major cloud service, consider the amount of money and time your company can save (or potentially make) by utilizing professional data center decommissioning services.
