Green Delete Inc. picked a pretty good time to hang out its shingle. The Chicago-based firm, which has been open a year, helps other companies erase data on computer hard drives and servers before they get rid of the equipment.
In January, Illinois joined at least 30 other states in enacting stringent new rules on the disposal of electronic equipment. Companies also must erase data on disposed computer hard drives to ensure privacy protection or face tough fines.
That means many more computers are likely to be recycled and reused instead of being hauled to landfills. And the law is intended to ensure private information isn’t passed along and shared with outside parties. Software programs that wipe out data on hard drives aren’t foolproof: Anyone with basic data-retrieval skills can extract information from a hard drive that has been scrubbed with one of those programs, warns Marilyn Slavin, Green Delete’s founder and CEO.
Green Delete is the first U.S. company that’s certified by the National Association for Information Destruction to perform onsite data eradication for clients. Green Delete ensures that any information it cleans out from computers and servers is gone for good.
An added bonus: Once a hard drive is completely sanitized, it can be resold.
Ms. Slavin, 48, has worked in the information technology industry for 25 years, spending most of that time selling and implementing Microsoft solutions for large corporations. For about 15 years at Microsoft, she worked often with Greg Reuter, another Green Delete co-founder and its chief technology officer.
She declined to provide revenues but said the company is projecting 30 percent sales growth in its second fiscal year, beginning this month. Some of that expansion is likely to come from new partnerships with national electronics outfits that recycle computers and resell them. In addition, Green Delete is partnering with IT consulting firms to help companies ensure their data is secure and private.
The company so far is working with eight large-scale customers, including a few national financial services entities and two universities.
Green Delete has 10 trained technicians on staff and has access to at least 20 more such specialists when demand grows for its services. The company is already garnering interest overseas, especially in London, where even stricter laws mandate data scrubbing from hard drives before companies can unload their IT equipment, she says.
If you think data eradication isn’t much of a problem, consider the headline on a news story published in PC Pro Magazine in December 2010: “NASA Sells Off PCs with Secret Shuttle Data”. Apparently, the Office of the Inspector General found that some very smart folks at NASA had neglected to properly erase potentially classified data from close to a dozen computers used in the Space Shuttle program before they were sold to local second-hand computer shops in the Cape Kennedy area.
(For an even more recent — and nearby — example, check out this headline from ChicagoBusiness.com this week: “Tablet snafu: Motorola says not all data wiped from refurbished devices.”)
Crain’s met with Ms. Slavin recently to learn more about how Green Delete helps clients avoid the same kind of mishap.
Crain’s: How did you get the idea for this company?
Ms. Slavin: At Microsoft, we worked on rolling out large solutions to global companies, but I didn’t know what they were doing with all this old equipment. We started to see that most of them didn’t have a plan, or the plan was to throw them to a recycler and hope for the best.
Slavin
In some cases, companies did software swiping, which takes it down to the operating level, but anyone with an IT background can get to this data, so it’s not really secure. When I go to privacy conferences, the experts there say this type of data breach is a problem and that data can be stolen. We saw a problem and decided to solve it.
Crain’s: What’s so unique about your data eradication services that companies couldn’t do on their own?
Ms. Slavin: Our biggest selling point is that we can do it a lot faster than other services. We do it onsite, so it’s done before the equipment leaves the company. We bring their equipment in another room, we pull out the hard drive and can do 30 to 60 computers at a time. It happens off the network so there’s no interruption in the operation of the business.
Companies are now realizing they have to budget for data eradication, but chief security officers are seeing they can get a return on investment for data eradication because they can resell their hard drives in a secondary market and get about a third of their costs back.
Crain’s: What else do you offer companies aside from cleaning out their data?
Ms. Slavin: We have asset management services that help companies save lots of money, too. For example, we can pull the licensing keys off the hard drives when we’re doing the eradication so they can be saved and reused in other hard drives. A licensing key comes with every piece of software, which enables anyone to download that software once again in a new system. We’ve saved companies $10,000 to $15,000 just by doing that.
Crain’s: What’s the green connection to the services you provide?
Ms. Slavin: Our service doesn’t break the hard drive and it can be reused, while others shred the hard drive. We hook companies up with the recyclers and we only work with certified e-Stewards recyclers because we know they’re recycling responsibly.
We also educate companies about why they should consider donating or selling their hard drives once our work is done. There’s lots of harmful chemicals in hard drives if they’re opened and you don’t want them in landfills because they might leach into the water supply. That’s one of the reasons all these states have anti-dumping laws.
