Verity ES launches enterprise-grade data deletion software
Verity ES, a new spinoff from data deletion specialist Revert Inc., has emerged from stealth and is focused on platter purging for enterprise customers.
Startup Verity ES emerged from stealth today, debuting its enterprise data deletion software and support services.
The Verity ES software can wipe data from storage hardware for enterprise data centers without the need for a manual process. Companies can then reuse data center hardware to meet environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives, or they can ensure decommissioned hardware has no compromising data leaking into the wild, according to Verity ES spokespeople.
Both use cases are only going to grow as data swells, said Ray Lucchesi, president and founder of Silverton Consulting.
"I've got a stack of laptops sitting here, all of which have very sensitive data from my perspective," Lucchesi said. "It's certainly a sizable need in the industry."
Platter purging
Verity ES is a spinoff of Revert Inc., a 21-year-old company that specializes in on-site data eradication services and hardware disposal, headquartered in Boulder, Colo.
Revert uses a combination of software packages and custom software to wipe drives and storage arrays, alongside physical methods like degaussing, a demagnetizing process that eliminates data on physical media. Large technology vendors such as IBM, NetApp and Hitachi make up the majority of Revert's customers.
A lack of standardized capabilities or software performance, along with maintaining the viability of the toolkit, led to the creation of the Verity ES software, according to Glenn Jacobsen, president and COO of Verity ES.
"We basically found that not one single tool could do everything for everything," Jacobsen said. "We literally had to carry in a briefcase of tools and utilities. ... We created a decision tree that manually allowed us to go and address all these different drives coming out of all these different vendors and manufacturers."
The market for data eradication software is small, according to Jacobsen, with Blancco Technology Group's titular software package as one of the few competitors for enterprise-grade data erasure.
The Verity ES software is licensed by time and the amount of additional support services required, including phone and on-site support. Additional features include operations monitoring and data forensic evaluations after wipes to offer suggestions and insights into what data might have failed to be fully eliminated from the software or whether the hardware itself could be failing.
The software works with both HDDs and SSDs, according to Jacobsen, and was evaluated on 311 HDD models and 46 SSD models with a 90% successful hardware sanitization rate with trial customers. The startup focused on data eradication capabilities and high-capacity drives larger than several terabytes, he added, noting success in wiping drives up to 14 TB for HDDs and about 8 TB for SSDs.
Wiped clean to go green
Many enterprises have committed themselves to ESG standards in the past several years, said Christophe Bertrand, practice director at Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget.
Reusing storage hardware for less pressing workloads is an affordable win and helps companies inch toward those goals, he said, but making sure older data is fully off the drives is a challenge that companies often solve with physical destruction.
There is only going to be more data. The hard drives are only going to get bigger.
Christophe BertrandPractice director, Enterprise Strategy Group
"The problem is you can't do that [reuse] without being sure all the data on those drives is gone," Bertrand said. "It takes advanced efforts to eliminate data on the drive."
Using software data wiping tools like Verity ES can also eliminate the need for a data center reconfiguration to pull drives for a data eradication process using physical tools, he added.
Traditional hardware shredding services can be wasteful if existing hardware could be repurposed, Bertrand said. Verity ES might be just "building a better mousetrap" for eliminating data, but it's a problem more enterprises will need to solve.
"The nature of the problem is one of scale for enterprises," he said. "There is only going to be more data. The hard drives are only going to get bigger."
Tim McCarthy is a journalist living on the North Shore of Massachusetts. He covers cloud and data storage news.
