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Increase Your Enterprise’s Data Protection with Remote IT Asset Erasure

Here’s how to remove sensitive data from employee work-from-home devices and distributed, multi-location data centers—without shipping equipment or taxing your technicians.

Vivian Cullipher Vivian is a career writer and editor, having covered technology-related topics for government and B2B organizations since before LinkedIn and the iPhone. As Blancco’s head of content, she oversees the development of thought-leadership-based copy for web, press, social media, and other blancco.communication channels.

Remote Device Sanitization in a Work-from-Home, Distributed Era

Traditional, onsite methods for securely erasing data fall short in light of today’s persistently distributed workforce and multi-data center infrastructures. The remote or hybrid work-from-anywhere reality means that enterprise IT doesn’t have physical access to many employee laptops and desktops, a trend that won’t change anytime soon. Likewise, having IT staff travel to different locations to sanitize data off of servers in a multi-location decommissioning project is highly inefficient.

Shipping such company assets with data on board to a centralized location for erasure is risky. If a device is lost or intercepted on the way, company data or personally identifiable information (PII) could be compromised. Organizations could also be exposed to financial risk in the form of fines and penalties for regulatory noncompliance, as well as financial liability and reputational damage in the case of a breach.

Instead, enterprises must be able to efficiently sanitize assets in place over the network, wherever they are located, to protect data from exposure.

Whether it’s one laptop or thousands of servers, Blancco equips organizations with the ability to sanitize IT assets on-prem or at-home from a remote connection, meeting the increased need for data protection within fast-paced, global operations. This capability provides enterprises with greater data security, broad support for international erasure standards, global compliance certifications and a tamper-proof audit trail.

Remote erasure of IT assets plays a role at multiple points in the device lifecycle, including:

Verified Sanitization Provides Enterprises with Security and Compliance Assurance

Software-based data erasure securely overwrites data from any data storage device via optimized erasure algorithms. These algorithms use different patterns for the overwrite, then verify that the erasure has occurred, thus preventing overwritten data from being accessed. While other commonly used data destruction methods (such as reformatting, data wiping and data deletion) prevent data access to varying degrees, data erasure does two things in combination that these methods do not:

Because enterprises typically use a wide range of drive and device technologies, it’s important to know that the right methods are applied to the right equipment for proper results, including when data storage assets are miles away from technicians. Secure remote erasure will verify the overwriting methodology has been successful and that data has been removed across the entire device according to the erasure standard chosen.

For endpoint devices in particular, secure erasures are easily executed by non-technical staff, then subject to verification to ensure true data sanitization.

Secure Remote Erasure Covers IT Assets Across the Enterprise

Whether it’s one laptop or thousands of servers, Blancco equips organizations to sanitize IT assets on-prem or at-home from a remote connection, meeting the increased need for data protection within fast-paced, global operations.

Deploying Blancco remotely can be adapted to your specific enterprise requirements. Across servers, desktops and laptops, multiple options exist for deploying, controlling and automating the erasure software.

Enterprise Servers

Management tools built into enterprise servers—such as the Cisco Integrated Management Controller, HP Integrated Lights Out (iLO), IBM Integrated Management Module and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC)—enable Blancco software to be installed directly on the target server for secure, remote, in-rack erasure over the network to support different relevant use cases:

These usages deliver benefits across the enterprise, including cyber security and compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR. The process is highly scalable, and Blancco customers have used it to erase thousands of servers simultaneously.

Laptop and Desktop Machines

Blancco secure remote erasure on client computers lets IT teams draw on familiar enterprise approaches and use common network tools to erase data from employee devices—no matter where the employee device is located. The typical process is as follows:

Remote Device Erasure Protects Data and Increases Data Security

Across use cases, Blancco remote erasure securely eliminates data from laptops, desktops and servers without requiring a technician to be present at every device location.

Instead, with flexible deployment methods, erasures can be carried out by endpoint device users or from a centralized location. This means devices can be sanitized before leaving corporate custody, protecting the business by dramatically reducing the chance of inadvertently disclosing sensitive information.

And, as with all Blancco data sanitization solutions, remote erasure of IT assets result in a tamper-proof, digitally signed certificate of erasure, supplying an unbroken chain of custody and the confidence that devices are immune from unauthorized data access.

Learn More About Blancco Solutions for Your Organization.

Visit our Data Erasure Software for Enterprise or Enterprise Data Center Solutions pages.
Be sure to request your personalized, free enterprise data erasure trial.

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