As a member of the High Technology Crime Investigation Association, I read around five to 10 interesting messages from the closed HTCIA list server every day from all kinds of law enforcement officials, private investigators and forensic specialists. Every now and then I get to respond with what I hope will be useful information. Recently, someone asked for the number of disk overwrites the Department of Defense recommends for destroying classified and secret information. [Network World on Security]
This is a very interesting article that touches on both storage and security. EMC's traditional method of "destroying" your data before they reclaim an array is VTOC'ing the drives, which isn't mentioned in any of the supporting articles. You might want to think twice about having EMC handle this in the future. I know dozens of companies who just hand their drives over to EMC when they are done an array and trust them to handle them properly. I've seen Symmetrix arrays sit on data center floor in unsecured areas for months. One particular Symmetrix array was involved in a law suit that could have been easily destroyed or the data manipulated.
