Purpose

To protect University of Manitoba's and its employees data by avoiding security breaches through effective hard drive decommissioning.

Policy Statement

IT personnel must follow a set of defined measures to properly destroy data on decommissioned servers, fax machines and desktops.

Applies to

All University of Manitoba owned computers, servers and fax machines that have data storage capability.

Responsibilities

Before decommissioning a server or desktop, the appropriate IT personnel must completely destroy the data on the hard drive(s) before the machine is taken out of service and label the machine accordingly. IT employees must follow these procedures whenever the following circumstances arise:

• When a desktop/server is upgraded and the old machine is to be sold, donated, discarded, or recycled.

• Whenever a drive is re-configured for existing or new users.

• Whenever equipment containing storage is returned to a manufacturer or other vendor for repair or warranty replacement.