DOD Level Data Wiping (5220.22-M)
Data Erase/Wiping services
What is DOD-Level Data Wiping (5220.22-M)?
Wiping the data on your storage arrays is paramount before you decide to sell or get rid of that hardware. Data wiping ensures that all your organization’s proprietary information, financials, and customer data is no longer accessible.
Protecting your organization’s data, especially if you have compliance regulations to meet, isn’t as easy as pushing the “delete” button. If you clear the drive in a traditional manner, that data is still accessible by a data recovery expert.
So, what should you do instead? Data wiping is the best solution for protecting your organization’s data. Data wiping goes beyond reformatting hard drives. Instead, data wiping deletes all the information on your hard drive. Data wiping also leaves the hard drives usable after the wipe is complete. This allows you to sell or trade-in the used drives for future use.
What Makes a Data Wipe DOD-Level?
To meet the standards set by the Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22-M), the data on each drive must be overwritten many times. This overwrite process renders the data unrecoverable. But, the process also keeps the drive usable.
The minimum DOD level requirement is the three pass overwrite, but there is also a seven pass overwrite (DOD 5220.22-M ECE) option as well.
How Does a DOD-Level Data Wipe Work?
Three Pass Overwrite
A three pass overwrite means that the data is overwritten with a set of characters three times. There is a verification pass as well to check that all the data on the drive has been overwritten.
There is a standard process for the three pass overwrite: a single pass with a “0” character, followed by a single pass with a “1” character, and a final pass with a random character.
Seven Pass Overwrite
Like the three pass overwrite, the seven pass pattern overwrites the data many times with a specific pattern of characters.
The standard seven pass process is: a “0” character pass, a “1” character pass, random character pass, a second random character pass, a “0” character pass, a “1” character pass, and a random character pass before the final verification pass.
