Avoid the ‘I told you so’ lecture at all costs

You would never dream of putting your hard copy bank statement in the bin, would you? Not without at least tearing it up into little pieces. Maybe you bought one of those home-shredders? It is the same at work. If you print out something confidential, you are careful with it. You would not leave it out on your desk whilst you nipped to the loo, and you would shred it if you threw it away. It is second nature. You know something contains sensitive information and you are sensibly careful with it.

Which makes some people’s attitude towards IT data security unfathomable. The same person who bought one of those home-shredders to destroy their private correspondence, left their old PC at the local tip, in the dry WEEE store, without any real idea what would be done with it, and ignoring the fact that all that correspondence and more is still on the hard drive. Every word, every account number, every little detail of your life.

Mr Spock would call it illogical. We do not seem to connect the hardware to the printout. No one would bother to turn that old PC on and dig around for old personal files, would they? Well yes they would actually. Because data, information of almost any sort, is valuable. Cyber crime is on the rise and no one really knows what will happen next, because it is quite new. We have only really been using computers for twenty five years or so, and the internet is even younger. 

The basic bottom line is if it is valuable, someone will try to nick it.

So our apathy is getting more and more dangerous. We have to wise up here. However you do it and whoever you use, you need to sanitise your data before you dispose of any piece of kit. Be it a phone or a laptop, a tablet or a printer, think about the memory. It may only be a small percentage of people that get caught out this way but why would you want to be one of them?

When you get rid of anything with a memory you are taking a risk, a gamble. Every single time. As soon as you let that old PC out of your sight, you have given your data to someone else. Serious if you are a consumer, bloody scary if you are a business. Because as a consumer, you are only risking your own data, your own identity, your own bank balance. But as a business, you risk other people’s data, and as such you have a duty of care. You can be heavily fined and soon imprisoned if you do not fulfil that duty of care.

Lightning rarely strikes but when it does, it tends to hurt. I’ll give you another little example from my own life. In my private life, a pair of jeans is second skin to me. And for forty odd years I always put my wallet in my back pocket. Never gave it a second thought. My then wife used to nag me about it when we went out. She said it was easy to steal, in plain sight, but I doubted anyone could take my wallet out of my pocket without me noticing. And it had never happened...until one day at Crawley cinema. It was heaving and I was focussing on my son, then little more than a toddler, who was doing his best to get lost in the crowds. I caught him and took him back to his Mum, who was queuing for a drink. I went to pay...and no wallet.

An expensive lesson which got me the ‘I told you so’ lecture. Which no man ever wants to hear. So now I am a little more careful. In busy places, I move my wallet to a less obvious place. I manage the risk. Which is, as I may have said before, what data safe IT recycling is really about.

We do have to change our collective attitude to data security. There is no alternative. Cyber crime is not going to go away. You know I am right. Every person I sit down and talk this through with in any detail ends up agreeing with me. You cannot trust dumb luck to protect you, and you cannot do half a job and expect to stay safe. Sooner or later your luck always runs out. Do it, and if you are going to do it, do it properly.

Otherwise I am going to be right here saying I told you so!

Morgan, Barton and Cowell do The Frog Chorus

What do you call an industry that no one really values, created out of more red tape regulations and allowed to operate in the dark world below the bottom line? A pain in the posterior? Confusing? A bit of a con?

Well I call it two things...a living and quite good fun...at times.

But still, let’s look at things objectively. All forms of waste have become a bit of a nuisance because of recycling laws. I mean, at home we all have more bins and buckets than we need or can really cope with most of the time, and we live in sheer terror of the bin men refusing to take something.

In business terms, the bin men won’t even collect; you have to make separate arrangements with a waste management company...or private bin men. You end up with coloured containers of various sizes stuck round the back of your shop or office and you pay for every ounce.

On top of that, there are special items...batteries, toner, electrical kit to name but a few...that need to be sorted out separately. If you are a busy facilities manager, how the hell do you keep up with what is what and where it all goes?

And the paperwork is endless!

It is one of life’s irritants. Like Piers Morgan or Joey Barton or Simon Cowell. Whenever we get an enquiry for an ordinary disposal, not a big fancy asset refresh, there is usually a mixture of things. It is obviously a clear out of junk, with maybe one or two nice bits of kit in amongst the detritus, and I often wince when I give someone a price.

How much? For junk? It seems impossible. How can life work out this way? But in the end it is just a cost of doing business, a tax on waste if you like. Well, I know you don’t like, but there is no use blaming me, is there?

However, I would argue that IT ‘waste’ is slightly different to your run of the mill rubbish. For a start there may well be someone who will give it a new home and extend the life just a little bit. A smaller business perhaps? Maybe even a charity. And if there is, you will be doing something good for the environment.

I have an issue with this point, because most people seem to forget all about the environmental aspect of recycling. Perhaps it is because we are being made to do it. Nigel Farage, now I may be doing him a disservice, but I am not sure he would be a huge recycling fan. Especially as WEEE regulations emanated from Brussels. I suspect he could work himself up into a right old lather about it if we gave him the chance.

And if I am honest, I did not think too much about sustainability before arriving on planet eReco. But now I have, it gives me a warm feeling inside. I am a simple sort of guy. Sustainability simply makes sense to me. Unless ET is delivering a fresh load of natural resources at some stage in the future, this is it; we have what we have. So using it in a way that we can keep on using the same resources again for as long as possible is a bit of no brainer.

But there are costs involved. As always, someone has to pay. And guess what, it’s you, or rather us. It is sort of my job to make sure it is you, but I want you to feel that we are in this together. Recycling IT is not a simple business. Quite apart from the joys of logistics and sorting through the junk, whilst providing all the waste transfer documentation and stuff, there are the demands of data protection and the intricacies of gaining and maintaining meaningful accreditations.

So whilst I understand that no one likes paying to get rid of old stuff, let’s try and look at it as an investment in the planet; something that needs to be done properly.

We all stand together! (Come on, you saw that punch line coming as soon as you read the title, didn’t you?)

Wenger’s Woes and ITAD Best Practise

Arsene Wenger is an honourable man of obvious integrity. As manager of Arsenal Football Club he has suffered from occasional bouts of short-sightedness but he is generally respected for his achievements over the last 18 years or so. But right now he is being abused by a portion of society for which there is as yet no printable descriptor.

Why?

Because Arsenal are 6^th in the Premier League and in the last 16 of the Champions League. Not a great season so far admittedly but no reason to panic. But panicking is what we do best in this day and age. We can panic in 140 characters or less in a matter of seconds. We can abuse. We can call on the support of heavyweight thinkers like Piers Morgan.

There is something about our society today that looks to apportion instant blame, without assessing the facts, without waiting for the dust to settle. The ability to comment instantly, and be vile and abusive without much fear of retaliation brings out the very worst in human nature.

In my view, the media fan these flames to an intolerable degree. Almost every news program seems to include Twitter comments from ordinary people. Something is trending usually before the BBC knows what is going on and we fly off on many strange tangents until the truth emerges from the mist. Can you imagine if Twitter had been around the day Diana died? #thedukedidit

Data scares get the same sort of treatment, maybe without the tribal fury of football, but any company caught out losing or abusing data gets a proper public hanging (you were wondering how I would get this back on topic weren’t you?). RBS were the latest example. Their IT system crashed denying their customers access to their money and the regulators fined them some £60m for having the temerity to make a mistake.

The comments on Social Media were as bad as Wenger. The faceless board of RBS, mostly owned by the taxpayers of this country at present, were pilloried and heads were supposed to roll. And then something else happened, or Arsenal won 6-0, and people moved on.

Which is nonsense. The whole furore missed the point as far as I was concerned, which in this particular example was in a boring little interview I heard on Radio 4. One of the experts consulted suggested that our banks are still using antiquated systems because there were serious security doubts about investing in newer stuff, and that the RBS problems were caused by the simple fact that no one knew how to fix the problem when it arose. The people who designed this kit have moved on, or retired, and the system is allegedly held together by sticking plaster.

I cannot vouch for this particular version of events but surely it merited further investigation, and those of a certain vintage with a cynical nature will admit that it has the stench of truth. But no, the media do not do much serious investigation anymore. The public attention span does not allow for it and the world had moved on. Twitter was alive with pictures of cute kittens.

Except I can’t, I am afraid. Move on, that is. I make my living out of data security and data protection needs to be on the agenda all the time. There are rules for this sort of stuff, but big business tends to comply in an offhand sort of fashion, paying lip service, doing its best to keep out of trouble but not taking the intention of the rules seriously.

If prevention really is better than cure the ICO and the banking regulators should be ensuring that the banks invest properly in a safe and secure infrastructure, not just sitting back and fining them when it all goes wrong. Ideally this sort of joined up thinking should be applied to all levels of data security and we could address some of the anomalies.

Like what, I hear you cry? Well, I will give you just one for today. Any business controlled by the Financial Conduct Authority has extra responsibilities beyond those on ordinary businesses. There is for instance a strong suggestion in their published fact sheet that hard drives should be wiped using specialist software before disposal, before the redundant equipment actually leaves the office.

Does this happen?

Well, I can only tell you this. EReco are one of only a few ITAD specialists who will send one of our teams to your office to run our software in your own secure environment. This is exactly the sort of software the FCA are talking about, and whilst it is not rocket science you need some training and not everyone can buy the software in the first place. Bearing in mind the FCA advice, you would think that our lads are out all the time, wouldn’t you?

Not so. Many of our financial customers are extremely secure, and we help them to remain so, but we have only rarely been engaged to data wipe on site. Read the FCA data fact sheet for yourself and see how many of these suggestions are being followed by companies you visit? FCA Factsheet

I am not saying these companies are taking any risks. If someone is using eReco, or indeed another reputable ITAD supplier, we take data security really very seriously indeed, right from the point of collection. It may be that the guidelines are too strict? It may be that the mobile shredders take up a lot of this business, which would be a shame as that is not the best solution environmentally. But the fact is that the rules are not being followed to the letter, even if many if not most are doing their best to follow the spirit.

In part, I think this is our fault. Not just eReco, but the entire industry. We are not strong enough at highlighting best practise. We have not effectively marketed our wares to SME’s, including selling the need for sustainability as well as data security, but also the regulators have failed to educate their members. I would like to see much clearer, unambiguous direction from the FCA, the ICO and other interested parties.

This is something we are trying to address, not least through this humble blog.