When something a bit out of the ordinary happens in a typical office environment it can raise some excitement and get you thinking about why we do things in a certain way.
We had a visit yesterday from an external team who arrived with an interesting piece of hardware.
Tape back-ups were something that our IT group has relied on over the last 10 years, but we have now moved to disk back-up; for cost, speed and practical reasons.
As part of this shift in technology and process we therefore had to ensure complete destruction of any historic data that is no longer required.
You can see here some of the stages in this process as the full tapes were loaded and ground down, and then finally “bagged up”. We get to keep a sample as proof of destruction.
The cost of the disks shown here was more than €10,000!
It reminded me of the story from a few years back when a UK Newspaper, The Guardian, had some of their machines destroyed by the UK government as part of the WikiLeaks story. The smashed MacBook Air and Western Digital hard drive became part of a large exhibition staged across the V&A museum in London around the role of museums in society.
That won’t be happening with our customer’s clinical data which has now been incinerated.
