
Skilled law enforcement leader Michael Coppola leverages more than 20 years of field experience to lead CJIS Solutions as founder and president. Through his company, Michael Coppola and his team provide law enforcement professionals with CJIS-compliant solutions, from cloud computing and cloud hosting to data destruction services.
All businesses rely on data of some sort, either as a record of their internal processes and financials or customer contracts. When this data is physical, destroying it is more straight-forward: companies or individuals can simply shred the documents to destroy. But this isn’t the case when the data is digital. Unless digital data is properly destroyed, it can be leaked or stolen, thus resulting in a loss of revenue, loss of customers, or many other negative consequences.
Destroying digital data involves the permanent erasure of information contained on an electronic device. This does not mean simply deleting a file. While deleting a file does remove it from the computer, it often remains on the hard drive or in another storage area. People can often still access or recover this information. The same is true even if the hard drive or other physical technology is destroyed. In some situations, data stored on a broken or smashed hard drive can be recovered with enough effort.
Rather than relying on these methods, companies must destroy the data and ensure it is non-recoverable before any technological component is sold or ruined. Usually, this involves data sanitation, a process that leaves highly sensitive data irrecoverable via data erasure, physical destruction, cryptographic erasure, or a combination of the three methods.

