Copier Machines

New Protection Against Data Theft Protects Businesses

There is always a threat that information will be stolen from your business. This includes the threat that your information will be hacked by those looking to steal information about clients or about financial information. This is why businesses install data security systems. They make sure their computers have virus protection and firewalls to keep threats out. It is good to know that the technology industry is keeping up with the threats to companies and making sure to make changes. Some of these changes have been implemented to protect businesses in ways they did not even know they needed to be protected.

One of the places many businesses are unaware they are not being protected is through their copier machines. This is because most people view a copier as nothing more than a modern day lithograph machine. What they tend to forget about is the fact that the demand on these machines grows every day. This has caused the copiers to become more technologically advanced in many ways. Copiers can collate, print on two sides, staple, sort and do everything but file your copies. These demands have led to the necessity of a hard drive being installed.

The hard drive in the digital copiers is the part of the machine which has created a security risk without many businesses even knowing it was there. To date the only way to be protected was to make sure that the systems linked to the copiers have been secure enough to prevent people from gaining access from outside of the office. Additionally the advice has been to make sure the hard drive from the copier is destroyed after you are done using the machine so that the information will not be recovered by others.

Recently, there have been companies like Toshiba offering new protection for your copier. This protection comes in the form of a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) with a Wipe feature. The point of the feature is that when you power down your copier at the end of the day the information which has been stored in it will be wiped clean and no one will be able to access the information it contains. This is of considerable importance to any business using digital imaging or printing anything which will take up a lot of space in the hard drive.

Many who are aware of the hard drive are under the impression the information will be deleted after it is used. It is important to note that the technological definition of deleting information is that the information will not be accessible by the computer and the disk space will be accessible for use. This does not mean that the information has been removed from the drive. It is not until the information has been written over that it will be removed completely from the drive. This is exactly what Toshiba is looking to do with the new Wipe feature in the SED drives they will be installing in their copiers.

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