Data Center Discovery and Teardown
Once your new IT assets arrive, the old ones need to be taken offline and decoupled from the corporate infrastructure. Each data-bearing device must be completely uninstalled, stripped of its network access, and meticulously accounted for.
Networking expertise, specialized equipment, and machinery, and having an in-depth knowledge of data center environments and discovery software are all crucial ITAD service vendor capabilities for data center teardowns.
Scalable data erasure
No corporation wants to end up in the news for a data breach, so this bit is critical. Every piece of equipment — from phones and tablets to fax machines—must have its data wiped.
The location of wiping can be on-site or remotely. This decision can be facilitated by input from your ITAD services vendor. On-site erasure in racks is more secure, but not feasible if the drives being liquidated have already been removed from racks and there is a substantial quantity of them (thousands). Regulations, speed, and expenses of each option will need to be considered.
In specific industries, data erasure is even more critical due to heavy regulations. For example, financial services companies must comply with the NIST standard of data erasure in some instances. In the healthcare industry, HIPAA laws can be very damaging in the event of a data security breach.
Regardless, a good ITAD company will tailor your data erasure requirements to any drive erasure protocols you may have. They also meet any hard drive shredding or degaussing policies your company may have in place.
Transport and Logistics
As anyone in the industry knows, servers are heavy. They’re also easy to damage and need to be disposed of properly. A capable ITAD vendor should be able to handle a migration of any size within your schedule. They should also be able to provide you with an audit trail and documentation for the disposal of every IT asset you remove.
In Conclusion
Over the next few years, data center technology spending will unsurprisingly continue to grow. As such, organizations will need to become more agile and able to turn over equipment more capably.
By partnering with a reliable IT asset disposition partner, the process of refreshing IT equipment can be easily facilitated. By removing the man-hours required to handle tedious data center decommissioning and ITAD processes, a company’s in-house IT staff can be spared to help with procurement, operations, inventory, analytics, network security, etc. As a result, their ability to keep up with digital transformation is improved.
