Decommissioning and Secure Wiping Procedures at End of Use
Irrecoverably deleting data when retiring devices
Decommissioning and secure wiping procedures define how a device is taken out of service, whether due to technology rotation, end of life or an employee's departure, ensuring that stored information is irrecoverably deleted before the device is reassigned, donated or discarded, through techniques such as cryptographic erasure or physical destruction of the storage. This matters in practice because simply formatting a disk or deleting files doesn't really erase them, but marks them as available space, leaving the information recoverable with publicly available forensic tools until it's overwritten. A real, recurring case is corporate devices sold as used or donated without proper secure wiping, where security researchers have managed to recover financial documents, emails and complete credentials simply by buying the second-hand hardware on the open market.