Proper Disposal of IT Assets & Safeguarding of Data

9 February 2022, Wednesday – An e-waste management system is established in 2021 by the Government to build on existing voluntary e-waste recycling initiatives in Singapore through the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) framework. Under this framework, producers of covered electrical and electronic equipment will be required to take on responsibility for their products to be properly recycled upon reaching their end of life, by fulfilling e-waste collection targets and channelling the e-waste collected to formal recyclers. ASPRI is pleased to partner with Metalo International to organise a webinar on ‘Proper Disposal of IT Assets & Safeguarding of Data’ to discuss the importance of proper IT Assets Disposition (ITAD).

Mr. Benny Cheng, Vice President of Metalo shared that ITAD is important especially data security as data breaches could occur if the data in a hard drive is not properly deleted when disposed of and information getting into wrong hands which could lead to theft and fraud for both customers or employees. Compromising of personal data that could leads to severe breaches, and may get into legal trouble with the authorities. Additionally, security breach could disrupt business operations and lead to bad reputation if any incident such as customer data lost or stolen.

Therefore, to ensure the proper and secure disposal of e-waste, ITAD providers use certified recyclers to have a complete data erasure by physically destroying the hardware or by degaussing, which electronically removes the magnetic field of a disk or hard drive using a special device. This is secure way to ensuring a total data deletion.

Hence, it is advisable for organisations to work with ITAD providers which specialises in the process of streamlining the disposition as the devices may contain heavy metals, chemicals and other materials that could be harmful to the environment when disposed of in a landfill which could leak into the ground and affect water sources. The ITD providers typically provide the secure destruction of data and environmentally friendly e-waste recycling.

To know more, please click here to view the presentation deck.

Finally, ASPRI would like to express our gratitude to our members for their attendance. We would also like to thank Metalo International for collaborating with us. We hope to see you in future events!