Deleting files isn't the same as destroying data. What businesses actually need to do before old laptops, drives and servers leave the building.
Dragging files to the recycle bin, or even formatting a drive, mostly just removes the pointer to the data — the actual information often remains recoverable with fairly ordinary tools. For a business retiring laptops, desktops, servers or backup drives, that's a real exposure: old customer records, financial data, or internal documents can end up recoverable by whoever gets the hardware next.
There are two reliable approaches: certified data wiping, which overwrites the drive's data multiple times until nothing is recoverable, and physical destruction, where the drive is shredded so it can't function at all. Which one makes sense depends on the drive — some organisations wipe drives they intend to resell or reuse, and physically shred anything going straight to recycling.
Either way, the process should end with a certificate of destruction naming the specific devices involved, not just a general statement that 'data was handled.'
The cleanest way to handle this is to treat data destruction as a step before dismantling or recycling even starts, not an afterthought. When a data destruction and recycling partner handles both, the device never needs to leave your custody until the data has already been dealt with.
