Securing Confidential Data

Securing confidential data in emergency situations is essential for mission-critical systems. Security agencies in the U.S. define several levels of “erasing” sensitive data for various storage media type, such as tapes, magnetic disks and optical disks. Each U.S. military force has compiled its own internal version, drawn from the DoD/NSA instructions.

Since erasing is a generic term, several others terms are used:

Clearing: Clearing is the process of eradicating data on the media before it is reused in an environment that provides an acceptable level of protection for the data previously stored on the media before clearing.

Sanitizing (also called Purging): Sanitizing is the process of removing data on the media before it is reused in an environment that does not provide an acceptable level of protection for the data previously on the media before sanitizing.

Destroying: Destroying is the process of physically damaging the media to make it totally unusable as a media, thereby making it impossible to retrieve data.