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Stay Ahead of the Finance Industry by Keeping your IT at the Cutting Edge

Keep the datacenter robust and lean to win the race with effective IT Asset Recovery.

How Hedge Funds, Securities, and Banks Keep their IT at the Cutting Edge

In the changing world market, split second transactions are often required to stay at the cutting edge. To meet that need, many financial organizations have augmented their human talent with the mechanical precision and speed of computers. When pursuing the scale, leading organizations go a step further and deploy entire datacenters dedicated to the crunching of numbers and churning of profit. Myriads of inflection points calculated to the second. The hedge fund, Capital Fund Management, “uses 1,500 servers to analyze 2.5 terabytes of information . . . every day.” As quoted in the February 2015 issue of the Bloomberg Markets magazine.

Maintaining that competitive computing edge often requires a rigorous upgrade strategy. What happens to all of the equipment replaced by the new? Does it continue to use power, cooling and space even though its run a 5% capacity? Is it relegated to a warehouse to steadily depreciate? Liquidate the excess and keep your datacenter and budget running lean in the race for dominating the financial industry.

Data Security

Which components do and don’t have data

When it comes to IT Asset Recovery is the entire server a data risk? Long term data is generally stored on drives, whether they be solid state or hard disk. Other forms of storage media may include removable media like CD’s, USB Drives, and compact flash. For backups, tape media may also be employed. Those components should be effectively regulated to prevent a data breach.

Memory, processors, RAID Cards, Networking cards, and SFPs do not carry business information. They may store a small amount of data that tells it how to operate, but no critical information should be on those components. The moment the power is removed from the components the information is cleared. So those components can be resold to fuel other IT projects without risk of data breech. The motherboard does have a programmable BIOS chip that stores information on how the system should run. It may have its identification and owner’s name stored in the BIOS. However it does not carry sensitive information, and it can easily be erased by restoring the motherboard to factory settings.

Different Ways to Destroy Data

Servers with sensitive client data and business secrets cannot be given to just anyone. A number of data leaks have occurred in the corporate world. To stave off a regulatory and PR disaster, financial institutions will ensure the data is handled and destroyed properly. They may choose to physically or digitally destroy the hard drives on site. However, that requires removing the drives from the servers. The data vendor may handle that, or may require the organization to remove the drives from the systems. A second option is to ship the systems as a whole to an IT Asset Recovery company who will handle the entire process, demanufacturing, data destruction, refurbishing, and resale.

Choosing Vendors

Whichever option is utilized, the vendor should provide a report by serial number of all of the drives received and destroyed or wiped. The vendor should be auditing by a third party to an industry standard. Thereby affirming the efficacy of their work. The company brand is very valuable and much time, effort, and funds were used to build the reputation the clients trust. Some standards of note may include, NAID, R2, and e-stewards. They are stringent standards that are audited by a third party and they include a data security portion. NAID especially if focused on data security.

Environmental Compliance

Staying Green keeps the corporation famous and not infamous. All non-reusable product should be responsibly recycled or disposed of according to current industry standards. Also important, is the Downstream documentation of where the product goes. Processes should be in place for the focus materials, PCBs, batteries, and other materials containing heavy metals.