Wipe Out: Ensconce Sweeps Data Off Hard Drives

Company:

Headquarters: Portsmouth, N.H.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: Digital Shredder

Year Founded: 2002

Number of Channel Partners: 15 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Almost every company eventually has to dispose of older hard drives, and they need a way to ensure (and prove) that the data on those drives was securely deleted.

The Lowdown: Proper handling of hard drives that need to be recycled, repurposed or resold has become a critical issue for customers looking to ensure that data on those drives does not become compromised.

Ensconce Data Technology has the answer: the portable Digital Shredder, a 19-pound appliance that not only securely erases data on a hard drive but also prints out a label that can be used to audit the destruction of the data for compliance purposes.

Best of all, drives can then either be safely destroyed, repurposed or resold without fear, said Phil Bracco, president and CEO of Ensconce.

Digital Shredder takes advantage of a little-known bit of code embedded in every hard drive manufactured by every vendor for the past eight years or so, Bracco said.

That code, called Secure Erase, was developed by hard-drive manufacturers and the National Security Agency, which determined that the world needs a way to securely erase data. However, that feature is not implemented in computers because the BIOS vendors don't want to offer the possibility of a disgruntled employee erasing data, Bracco said.

The Digital Shredder evokes a command based on Secure Erase that can wipe all the data on a 120-Gbyte hard drive in about 35 minutes vs. five hours to six hours for a triple overwrite scheme, he said.

"It's a certified process," Bracco said. "At the end, the customer gets a certification that the drive was erased. And everything done in a Digital Shredder is recorded."

The Digital Shredder creates a physical label that can be stuck to a hard drive to provide detailed data purge information that is compliant with most government regulations. It also keeps a log of all purging activity for compliance purposes.

Solution providers can work with the Digital Shredder in several ways. For customers who need to erase hard drives but prefer not to purchase the unit, solution providers can charge on a per-purge basis. The typical cost to solution providers is about $6 per purge, and they can charge $10 per purge for a good margin, Bracco said.

Solution providers can also offer a "purge and sweep program" under which they place a unit at a customer site and charge for it based on the customer's anticipated number of purges, he said. This works best with a minimum of 600 data purges per year, he said.

The Digital Shredder includes "personality modules" that fit specific types of hard drives. Currently, five personality modules are available, and with two more that are expected to be available soon, the device will work with any drive from any manufacturer, Bracco said.