3 Ways to Save Money in Your Data Center with Data Erasure

You may have already heard that data erasure can save your organization money, but did you know that your data center, in particular, can see huge benefits by investing in good data sanitization practices? From saving money by erasing the data you don’t need to earning money back from your RMA drives, software-based data erasure is worth its weight in ROI. Read on to learn three ways to save money […]

Katie Moss Jefcoat Katie has launched and supported marketing campaigns for B2B technology companies since 2011. From 2016 to 2021, Katie served Blancco in the roles of content manager and senior product marketing manager, communicating the features and benefits of Blancco products, evaluating market and competitive trends, supporting sales enablement, and representing the voice of the customer.

You may have already heard that data erasure can save your organization money, but did you know that your data center, in particular, can see huge benefits by investing in good data sanitization practices? From saving money by erasing the data you don’t need to earning money back from your RMA drives, software-based data erasure is worth its weight in ROI. Read on to learn three ways to save money in your data center with data erasure.

1. Erasing Unnecessary Data Instead of Storing it

We mentioned in our previous blog that that only 15 percent of the average company’s data is considered business-critical, 33 percent is redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) and 52 percent is unclassified (dark) and holds no value. That’s a lot of data your company is keeping that you don’t need. And the more your data piles up, the higher your storage costs. By securely erasing data that’s old, unnecessary or no longer important to your business for compliance purposes, you can reduce the number of servers and storage that are used in your data center, the number of people taking care of those servers and the heating and cooling costs it takes to keep them up and running.

2. Automate and Scale Decommissioning

What does your current server decommissioning process look like? Slow, manual? With Blancco Data Center Eraser solution, you can decommission hundreds, or even thousands, of servers overnight with a simultaneous process, instead of being forced to implement traditional time-consuming processes that may take days or weeks. This quick process even works on full racks of servers, reducing the amount of manual processes and allowing you to increase efficiency. You’ll also save money by paying for less manpower over time, and the servers you’ve erased can be safely reused, recycled or resold with complete peace of mind.

When choosing a data erasure software for server decommissioning, ensure it offers the following:

• Verification of successful erasure, including a tamper-proof audit trail to certify data sanitization
• Choice of erasure methods, including flexibility among specific erasure standards for regulatory compliance
• Flexibility across media, including conventional spinning hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs)
• The ability to connect, erase and monitor servers across clusters, areas, rooms and locations.

3. Saving Money on HDDs and SSDs

End-of-Lease (RMA) Drives

Onsite erasure of RMA disks removes the disk content so that that the drives can be transported risk-free to the OEM for warranty replacement, avoiding costly disk retention fees. The data center – not the OEM – owns the data and is responsible for its erasure to prevent data leaks. If you are not able to completely erase the data contained on RMA drives, you won’t be able to return them to the manufacturer and will be on the hook for fines. By erasing them onsite, you save can save a significant amount of money. See one example from a customer below.

Loose Drives

A secondary, but less common way to save money with HDDs and SSDs is by erasing the piles of loose drives you have lying around your data center/ storage closets. By securely erasing these drives, you can then resell or reuse them, saving the costs of purchasing new media and/or earning money back on your original purchases.

Storing Onsite? There’s Another Option

If you currently retain all media (including loose drives) at your organization’s data center sites to ensure legal and internal business control rules, know that that’s not your only option. Each software-based data erasure from Blancco provides a 100% tamper-proof audit trail, with a compliance- ready Certificate of Erasure for each erasure instance. We see about 80-85 percent of failed drives still respond to our software-based overwriting software, and once that data is securely erased, the media can exit your data center free of worry.

To learn more ways to save money in your data center, sign up for your free Data Center Eraser trial today.

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