I am not sure how many of our readers will remember the original Lost in Space that began on September 8th, 1965 and ran for 3 seasons/83 episodes until March 6th, 1968. Originally filmed in black and white it switched to colour for season 2's opening episode shown first on September, 14th 1966. Not that I knew it was in colour, the BBC didn’t launch colour until 1967/8 and it was some time after this that our family got a colour TV.
One of the stars of the series was Robot, although not as scary as the Robot in the shiny remake, it’s stock phrase “Danger Will Robinson” did give me a bit of a fright as it stumbled across the TV screen. Will was the youngest of the Robinson family who as pioneering space colonists are thrown of course and struggle to survive in the furthest reaches of space on different planets against various aliens and the weaselly and cowardly Dr Zachary Smith, a clandestine saboteur from an enemy nation who actually conspired to get the family lost in the first place!
In today’s working environment we are thankfully neither danger from aliens, nor (hopefully) rogues like Dr Smith. Yet whilst we are not “lost in space” we are in danger of being lost in a sea of data that increases the threat to our data security as it increases in volume every hour of every day as we generate megabytes of data just going about simple tasks such as sending emails or saving documents to our hard drive. The advent of cloud-based data storage has gone some way towards making our data both readily accessible and potentially more secure, however there are still desktops and servers full of petabytes of data over 50% of which is redundant, according to research by Experian Data Quality, costing global business $3.3 trillion in 2020.
Further, with many countries adopting strict data protection laws, such as GDPR in the UK, disposing of this data is not actually that simple, deleting a file or even formatting a drive leaves behind an identifiable residue of data that can be readily deciphered by software openly available on the market. Some companies have taken to having their drives crushed, or simply using a hammer to smash the salient part of the drive that contains the information, this “Crush! Kill! Destroy!” method, to quote the Robot from Lost in Space, might be effective but one often wastes a perfectly good disk drive in the process and creates an environmental legacy that could be avoided by refurbishing and reusing the drive.
I have spoken before about how Sumo Technologies works to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment by adopting the 7 R’s of Sustainability and offering services that seek to recover, repair, reuse, and upcycle products and components. In the wake of this mass of redundant data taking up space on perfectly usable or reusable disk drives Sumo offer a Data Destruction and Drive Refurbishment service whereby we will take your drives, completely remove the data, give a report and a certificate for each drive, and either refurbish and reuse the drive ourselves, or return the drive to you. To find out more about this and get then click on the image below, you’ll never have to “Crush! Kill! Destroy!” a drive again.
