Ashfords / Ruby Datum Drive Erasure | Blancco Case Study

In 2016, the amount of reported data breaches rose by about 40 percent. To combat these rising figures, privacy organizations, businesses and individuals across the globe are putting more focus on securing personal and business data. To do this, they must invest in secure data sanitization methods to ensure complete data removal from both active and end-of-life assets.

* Forbes, Cyber Crime Costs Projected To Reach $2 Trillion by 2019
** Business Insider, Cyber attacks are costing companies millions of dollars — here’s how they can mitigate these costs
*** Blancco, The Leftovers: A Data Recovery Study, June 2016

Challenge

Ashfords was working with Quantuma, the administrators of KWM (King & Wood Mallesons, previously known as SJ Berwin) one of the biggest ever UK legal failures. Ashfords was brought in by Quantuma to manage the extraction and transfer of client data and to manage the return of all electronic devices that might have contained confidential information. These assets needed to be erased so that no personal information could be recovered. Ashfords needed to erase all KWM’s 900+ laptops, PCs and servers around the London area as soon as possible to get the maximum resale value and protect employee privacy.

Solution

Ashfords’ technical team, along with Ruby Datum’s Operations Director, Tom Godwin, discussed the three potential companies that they had identified as potential solution providers. The team unanimously agreed to go with Blancco because we were well known to them as an industry leader in drive erasure. Additionally, a colleague who had used Blancco software in a previous company highly recommended it.

To achieve data sanitization on all of its IT assets, Ashfords and Ruby Datum chose Blancco Drive Eraser and Blancco Toolkit for straight-forward, selfservice solutions that could help them work more efficiently. Blancco Toolkit is part of Blancco’s hardware offering and can erase machines that are no longer connected to the internet. Blancco Toolkit includes HASP keys that authenticate purchase of the software offline and are rechargeable with additional erasures. Certificates of erasure are stored on these keys—not online or in the Blancco Management Console.

After the initial erasure process was completed on several hundred laptops and PCs, Ashfords decided to extend its number of licenses to perform additional erasures. As the company was using Blancco Toolkit, it wasn’t necessary for Blancco to send any additional equipment; more erasure licenses could simply be loaded on the HASP keys and used immediately.

Blancco Toolkit allowed Ashfords and Ruby Datum to erase 50-60 offline machines simultaneously. Once a HASP key was placed into a machine, it could be extracted after a couple of minutes and placed into the next machine. The first machine would continue to run the software without the key inside. Due to this fast and secure process, Ashfords and Ruby Datum completed all the erasures within just a few days.

“Blancco was the obvious choice to help us through what was a challenging and time-pressured period. Blancco’s software provided us with the means to erase data from hundreds of machines in quick fashion and with minimal setup time.”

Peter Jones, Lead Consultant, Ruby Datum

About Blancco

As the de facto standard in data erasure, Blancco provides thousands of organizations with an absolute line of defense against costly security breaches, as well as verification of regulatory compliance through a 100% tamper-proof audit trail. Our data erasure solutions have been tested, certified, approved and recommended by 18 governing bodies around the world. No other security firm can boast this level of compliance with the most rigorous requirements set by government agencies, legal authorities and independent testing laboratories.