Even the best intentions, however, can easily go awry when it comes to disposing of old equipment. Many times, aged equipment is kept in a storeroom before being eventually disposed of during a spring clean. But if data on this equipment hasn't been properly wiped, confidential business or government information can easily end up in unknown hands when the equipment is snatched up at auction.
Such carelessness has resulted in embarrassment for more than a few government agencies in the past, underscoring the need to wipe hard drives clean effectively. The US Department of Defense DOD 5220.22-M standard contains generally accepted guidelines for properly erasing data -- a procedure that basically involves overwriting all data on the disk with alternating codes of 10101010 and 01010101 between five and seven times.
Hard drives aren't the only place where confidential information might hover, however. Routers, switches, and other network devices may well contain passwords, server IP addresses, and other information that could give potential intruders an open door into a corporate network. Wilkinson relates a story of the time he was at a computer fair and saw a vendor offering a used router from a leading telecommunications company with the company's name still written on a piece of masking tape on its side.
Licensing, security, and physical disposal issues highlight the many pitfalls that can trip up unsuspecting companies as their IT equipment reaches the end of its life. While the urge to preserve equipment as long as possible is natural, there also needs to be specific policies in place to dispose of that equipment quickly once its maintenance cost exceeds the cost of buying new systems.
Similarly, cumulative license costs need to be managed over time to ensure it's not more expensive to keep outdated devices licensed that it would be to get rid of them all and migrate to a small number of faster servers. In the end, knowing when to cut your losses is the key to maintaining a cost-effective IT lifecycle.
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• Aging IT gracefully
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