Spock says it is not logical

Hoarding is easier. I think every man knows that deep down, but most of us live with women who do seem to get an extra chromosome...the tidy gene. At home that means the remote control does not live on the sofa and that newspaper from last Wednesday is not going to turn into a fixture...if you want to live. But at work, we have rather more power and I have never known a store cupboard or room yet that is not a male preserve.

I am not being sexist here. I am all for equality and have personally never craved storeroom control but it is just a fact of life. Where there is a growing pile of junk a man is involved. He naturally sees the effort and potential problems involved in getting rid and has never yet derived any real pleasure in seeing any space clutter free. It only a member of the fairer sex who can spend countless hours cleaning a room and then declare that it was all worthwhile because it looks so clean and tidy. A man would much prefer to close the door and watch the footie.

So the storeroom tends to fill up over time. There are the stores of course...the paper, maybe some toner for the printers, a bit of stationary...but the most interesting stuff is the waste. You know what I mean. The stuff we all know we are finished with but getting rid of it completely would take some real positive action. The broken chair, those old filing cabinets, that fax machine no one was using anymore, the accounts printer that only prints when it feels like it and that old desktop that crashed last month.

This is the stuff you cannot put in the bins round the back of the office. It’s easy to get rid of waste paper and discarded coffee cups and milk cartons. You have bins for that and the collection is all arranged on a bi-weekly basis with that nice man in the hi-viz jacket, but he does not take broken chairs and he does not take old computers. And the old computers are tricky. Dimly in the back of your mind, you remember that it has a hard drive. You cannot just throw that away. So putting it in the boot of the car and slipping it down the local tip is not really an option. You know you are not supposed to do that with business waste anyway but the hard drive worries you, a little. Not enough to do anything else but stack it in the storeroom though. Because it is safe there. Out of sight and out of mind.

Except that is not the answer. Not forever. Eventually the storeroom gets full. Eventually someone with influence suggests that it looks like a tip in there. Sooner or later you are forced to face up to the fact that this stuff has to go.

Ideally at this point you realise that your first priority should be data security, closely followed by the demands of sustainability. In other words, get it data clean then recycle it. And herein lies the problem of course, because it is at this point where some people get the impression that someone will clear their storeroom for free, whilst meeting their various priorities.

Let’s recap. This is waste. You know it and I know it. Not only has it been in that storeroom since Clive Sinclair last had a glint in his eye but it was put there because it is BROKEN. Your list of stuff includes a few bits of IT equipment, a few bit of general WEEE and some broken down old office furniture. And yet you expect someone to come and get it, give you all the right paperwork, erase your data and recycle the kit for...nothing.

Sorry Jim, this is not logical. And the problems are all caused by people not understanding what we are doing here. This is about the data and the planet. We all have a legal responsibility to protect the data we hold that concerns other people. That sounds reasonable to me. I do not want any business or organisation that has my personal details risking any sort of breach thank you very much. And the government and the European Union take it seriously enough to pass laws making it illegal, with very large fines. Quite soon directors will be held responsible, and could end up going to jail if they are found guilty of some seriously nefarious data related disaster.

So before you hand your entire database over to some free collection service, be bloody sure that they are going to do things properly....for nothing remember. Of course sir, your data will be rubbed out using a J-cloth and some white spirit, when old Joe gets around to it. Well if old Joe gets around to it. Nothing really to worry about, because we will be sending it to Africa anyway...

Which brings us back to the planet. Tossing your data away might cost you £500k, which turns a free collection into a very expensive mistake. But not ensuring that your equipment is properly recycled is quite literally a crime against nature. I am relatively new to this industry but I have come to hate landfill, and the idea that we can countenance so many people cheating the regulations to make a profit, or in our example’s case save a few quid.

I am beginning to resent losing orders to these free services. Part of that is my natural inclination to compete. I like winning you see, and therefore hate losing. I am not and never have been a good loser. I make Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho and Alex Red-Nose Ferguson look positively cheery by comparison with me. But that is because they usually play on a level playing field.

£100 to get rid of a pile of junk legally, morally and responsibly is not a bad deal. Nothing to get your database on eBay and your old equipment into landfill in Ghana is a terrible deal.

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.