Wiping & Degaussing

AmpleTech Refresh offers

Our facilities and trucks are outfitted with NSA approved degaussing equipment.  This equipment has been certified by the NSA as acceptable for destruction of classified hard drives and tapes.  For customers requiring destruction of classified materials, degaussing hard drives then shredding them is the only NSA approved process. Cage code is available upon request. All the equipment used by AmpleTech Refresh is annually re-certified to meet rigorous performance standards.

We offer on-site degaussing services at your facility, or off-site degaussing services at one of our controlled and monitored data centers.  As a nationwide vendor, our degaussing and data destruction processes comply with corporate policies and legal mandates.  Our unique and proprietary process along with our highly trained and screened personnel provides the highest level of security for hard drive disposal.

“Degaussing is the process of decreasing or eliminating a remnant magnetic field. It is possibly named after the Gauss unit of magnetism, which in turn is named after Carl Friedrich Gauss. Due to magnetic hysteresis it is generally not possible to reduce a magnetic field completely to zero, so degaussing typically induces a very small “known” field referred to as bias. Degaussing was originally applied to reduce ships’ magnetic signatures during WWII. Degaussing is also used to reduce magnetic fields in CRT monitors and to destroy the data on magnetic media” according to Wikipedia.

Data is stored in magnetic media, such as tapes and hard drives, by making very small areas called magnetic domains change their magnetic alignment to be in the direction of an applied magnetic field. This phenomenon occurs in much the same way a compass needle points in the direction of the earth’s magnetic field. Degaussing, commonly called erasure, leaves the domains in random patterns with no preference to orientation, thereby rendering previous data unrecoverable. Hard drives cannot be reused after degaussing though some tapes can be reused after degaussing services.

AmpleTech Refresh also offers certified data wiping services for Hard Drives.  This process can be done on-site or off-site depending on the clients needs.  By utilizing our state of the art data killing software, our team of trained technicians can conduct the wipe by driving to our clients facilities in our trucks.  Our team can also provide clients with secure shipping totes that can be packed up and shipped out to our facility and have the wiping down at AmpleTech Refresh.

Our methods of wiping include the following procedures

Each method is aligned to meet all standards of secure data wiping by following the NIST 800-88 and DoD compliance regulations.