Imagine that you are upgrading, or taking out of service, a server that has had confidential data stored on it. This could be patient records in a hospital, credit card data in a retail organization, secret weapon plans in a defense plant, whatever. What do you do with the hard disks in the server? There are serious compliance issues at stake here.

Hard disks these days don't have much of a lifetime. The disks from a server you built two or three years ago are probably not worth saving for another use. But you can't just throw them out.

Standard formatting tools aren't perfect. They're not designed to eliminate data completely, but more to get the disk blank enough and set up for new use. In fact, all software tools have a tough job eliminating data, in that old data can survive multiple writes. Nevertheless, there are software products (such as those from Blancco) that erase data to varying standards of completion.

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