If you’ve ever considered selling or recycling your old phone or computer, the first step you’ve likely executed is a “factory reset” to delete all of your personal data from the device. After performing a factory reset, your device is supposed to look like it did the day you bought it, right? Leading security company Avast recently put that theory to the test and the results may surprise you.
For their study, Avast purchased 20 used Android phones, on Ebay, and were able to quickly and easily restore the personal information and data for the previous owners, including personal photos, contact information, music, data files and contacts. Amazingly, the only technical tool they employed was standard data recovery software, commonly available to any user. As you can well imagine, that puts many users at great risk of having their personal information in the hands of a stranger.
Many users assume that a factory reset will delete all of their personal information but that is simply not the case. Any time you “wipe” a storage device, such as a phone, or a hard drive, the factory reset option only removes the index information for the files but the data is still on the drive. In fact, the content will remain on the phone or hard drive until it’s overwritten with other data, so it can be restored with the proper software, compromising your important business information. This fact is actually true of every storage device, including servers. As you can well imagine, this presents a unique challenge for businesses whose users may have proprietary or confidential information on their business mobile phones or other devices, such as laptops or tablet computers.
WheelHouse can work with you to move your business to new phones, both mobile and business, computers or servers, while ensuring that your business data is transferred to your new hardware but not left on your old devices. When you work with WheelHouse, you’re partnering with a trusted managed service provider, who can ensure that your data cannot be recovered from decommissioned phones or hard drives. These thorough and proprietary measures ensure that we’re protecting your sensitive business information, such as accounting files, personal financial data, customer information and other confidential files.
WheelHouse Solutions provides managed services to customers throughout the St. Louis metro region. If you would like more information about our Managed Services and data device disposal, we invite you to fill out the form on this page and one of our representatives will get back with you shortly.