Data Destruction, at Your Disposal

So what do you do with those old PCs and servers when you buy new equipment?

Some organizations out them in storage, delaying the inevitable, while others donate, auction, landfill, or recycle the equipment. Most companies still take responsibility today for wiping their own hard drives clean of data, although not always safely and thoroughly, which leaves data vulnerable to falling into the wrong hands. (See Second-Hand Drives Yield First-Class Data and A Garbage Can for Hard Drives.)

The number of expired and outdated technology assets is eye-popping: There were around 40 million PCs and laptops alone retired last year, according to IDC estimates. Those numbers are likely to be a lot higher in the next year or so, as Vista deployments come along, especially considering the average lifespan of a laptop is two years; a desktop machine, three; and a server, three to five years, according to Gartner.

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Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading