With the onslaught of winter and the prospect of snow comingonce again, I was lamenting our family's recent summer vacation toSan Diego and my fascination with watching the ocean rolling inover the beach during the course of a day – and being fascinatedwith the waves washing away the tell-tale traces of footprints leftin the sand from my kids.

I remember thinking wouldn't it be nice if we could simply washaway all the garbage from our lives and simply start clean each daywith a fresh clean view of our own personal beach.

If only it were that simple!

The realities of work in the technology industry soon caught upwith me as I dealt with a customer issue where one of their servershad experienced multiple drive failures, which in turn required acomplete rebuild and restore of their system.

A service call had been placed, replacement drives shipped, anda tech support rep scheduled to swap out the bad drives thefollowing morning. The only thing that could be done now wasto wait for the server to be rebuilt and system restored.

I thought back to my beach experience, however, and wonderedwhat happens to the drives that are swapped out? Are theydestroyed? Are they simply thrown away? Or are they returned to thehardware vendor and sent out for refurbishment?

My concern was, even though the drive failed, that the dataprobably hadn't and was still present on the disk platter. If thosedrives are sent out for refurbishment, are they scrubbed or simplytaken apart, formatted, and put back in someone else's serversafter rebuild?

I turned to several folks who have extensive experience in therecovery of lost data both from a forensic background as well as adata recovery background and was surprised to learn that, yes, thecustomer's old data was potentially accessible to someone who hasthe desire, tools and time to run a recovery process on it.

I then asked if the manufacturers who provide the “refurbed”drives actually cleansed the data and I could not get a good answeras to what actually takes place other than most are probablyshipped overseas to be rebuilt and refurbished before beingreturned to service.

That shocking insight left me wondering could sensitive memberdata be floating around out in the world for some bored tech to runa recovery disk against to see what was there? The cold cruelanswer was possibly yes.

Needless to say, I am a bit concerned to think of all thebusinesses and industries – credit unions included – served bythese large hardware organizations that each have potential risksevery time one of their drives fails as well.

Now factor in the ever-growing world of cloud storage and themassive arrays that house any and every kind of data out there andyou begin to see why this might be a little disconcerting.

So without raising the panic alarm, I thought I would providesome general thoughts and guidelines for dealing with your datashould you decide to get rid of old PCs, have a drive fail, orsimply decide to donate your home computer.

In a nutshell, take out the old drive, take it to a company thatspecializes in shredding electronics and make sure you physicallydestroy that unit.

Yes, there are software programs that can cleanse data, andremove the majority of risk by overwriting sectors with random dataetc., but that is a little hard to do if the drive is bad but thedata on the platter isn't. See my point?

So here is a final 2012 tech risk management tip of the year foryou: If and when you have to call your hardware manufacturer forsupport on a bad drive, do not allow them to take that drive. Paythe deposit fee and then physically destroy the drive.

Yes, that may sound a bit extreme and a lot more work than mostwant to deal with, but unlike the ocean that seemingly washes awaythe footprints in the sand, all it takes is one large monster stormthat uncovers a lost shipwreck of 100 years ago to remind us thatall is not lost just because it is hidden from sight.

ScottCowan is vice president of sales and marketing at Millennial Vision Inc.in Salt Lake City.