Santa Barbara Safeguards County Data With Data Erasure

As with many government entities, a priority for California’s County of Santa Barbara (CSB) is protecting the personally identifiable information (PII) of constituents and employees.

For CSB, this includes nearly half a million residents, 4,000 county employees, and thousands of businesses. To avoid leaking sensitive data from information technology (IT) assets like PCs and servers, CSB’s IT group carefully tracks assets from purchase through retirement – a challenging task given CSB’s decentralized structure with numerous departments throughout the county. As part of its asset lifecycle management strategy, CSB turned to the certified data erasure software from Blancco for a failsafe, verifiable way of removing data prior to asset disposal or reuse.

Certified data erasure software from Blancco provides CSB with an overwriting technology for 100% data removal, while offering detailed audit reports for IT policy enforcement. Although the software is centrally managed and administered by CSB’s core IT group, it also supports local execution over the LAN. A further advantage is Blancco’s service site, accessed over the Internet, which allows an IT group to distribute erasure administration rights and serves as a central repository of erasure reports.

"Certified data erasure software provides the county with consistency across the board in how data is removed, supported by industry best practices in data removal algorithms," said Daniel Milei, CSB’s Chief Security Officer and Assistant Director of IT. "In addition, the BlanccoReports.com website allows IT to manage the various CSB departments and create a hierarchy of users with specific erasure credentials and privileges for viewing reports."

CSB uses data erasure software for IT equipment that is reassigned to another department, donated to schools or charities, or permanently retired. Currently, around 30 CSB employees have privileges to erase IT equipment, but security officers in each department can assign additional staff for the task when necessary. Through the BlanccoReports.com website, IT can check erasure status before an asset goes out the door, just as security officers check it before it leaves a department. With certified data erasure in place to support checks and balances in its security policy, CSB is more confident that it can prevent a serious data breach.

"From a best practices and liability protection standpoint, I am absolutely convinced that the county has greatly reduced the potential for data leaks, and the use of data erasure software has played an essential part in improving security processes," Milei continued. "Blancco not only enables our processes, it provides us the assurance that we are doing the best possible job in removing data."