i-SIGMA Board to Consider Addition of Solid State Drive Erasure to Certification

August 30, 2018

After more than a year of planning and postponements related to the recent merger, the i-SIGMA Board of Directors will decide whether or not Solid State Device (SSD) erasure operations are included within the scope of overall NAID AAA Certification of Sanitization Operations.

According to i-SIGMA CEO Bob Johnson, though pressure from service providers and their customers has been building, adding SSD erasure operations posed new challenges for the organization.

“Unlike the overwriting of conventional hard drives,” said Johnson, “effective forensic analysis techniques for the wide array of SSD applications are not as simple or standard. Logistically, we have to be able to evaluate SSD erasure for everything from smartphones to enterprise-level servers.”

Like NAID’s existing hard drive sanitization operations certification, those adding SSDs will be required to demonstrate the efficacy of their erasure processes in real time, be subjected to prescribed quality control measures and item tracking.

Barring any unforeseen developments over the next week, Johnson expects overwhelming support for the amendment. “The board has been asking for this for a long time,” says Johnson, “they were just waiting for us to get the systems in place.”

If he’s right, ITAD service providers, electronics recyclers, and refurbishers already NAID AAA Certified will be able to add an endorsement for SSD erasure operations seamlessly and with little inconvenience.