A systems administrator is tasked with decommissioning several physical servers that have reached the end of their life cycle. These servers previously stored confidential corporate financial records on their hard disk drives (HDDs). Which of the following is the MOST critical step to ensure data security during the disposal process for the HDDs?
Update the asset management inventory to mark the servers as 'decommissioned'.
Format the drives using the operating system's standard formatting utility.
The drives should be physically destroyed using a method like shredding or pulverizing.
Wipe the drives using a single-pass data overwrite method.
The correct action is to physically destroy the drives. Given that the servers contained confidential financial data, ensuring the data is completely unrecoverable is the highest priority. Physical destruction, such as shredding or pulverizing, is the most effective method to guarantee data is unrecoverable, a concept known as addressing data remanence. Standard formatting only removes file pointers, leaving the actual data on the disk and easily recoverable with specialized software. A single-pass overwrite is a data sanitization method but is considered less secure than physical destruction, especially for highly confidential data. While updating the asset management inventory is a crucial part of the overall decommissioning process, it is an administrative task and does not address the immediate security risk of the data on the drives.
Ask Bash
Bash is our AI bot, trained to help you pass your exam. AI Generated Content may display inaccurate information, always double-check anything important.
What is data remanence?
Open an interactive chat with Bash
Why is physical destruction more secure than overwriting data?
Open an interactive chat with Bash
What are the methods for securely destroying HDDs?