Xperien has warned delegates at the ITWeb PoPI Update II 2017 that it’s time to comply with the PoPI Act now that it has been signed by the President. It says the Information Regulator has published the regulations for comment and companies will only have one year from the commencement date to comply or face significant consequences.
The PoPI Act regulates how companies handle, keep and secure personal information and was already signed into law three years ago. With the appointment of the Information Regulator, companies urgently need to upgrade their IT security systems ahead of the implementation of the Act.
Bridgette Vermaak, Head of IT Asset Disposal at Xperien, presented a paper designed to help companies to comply with the PoPI Act and also how to reduce the total cost of ownership. She also showed how she helped and re-engineered the processes at a prominent South African retail bank.
She pointed to the development of an IT Asset Disposal (ITAD) policy as a key to clearly establishing the scope of the project, “Detailed planning is crucial to facilitate communication between the numerous teams involved, from decommissioning to certification.
“Optimising resources at the bank was only possible by providing process security sensitive options to total data destruction. Reverse logistics was made simple through this approach, ensuring zero storage and mitigation of risk during the chain of custody, executing national collections with options for low-risk items,” she explained.
Xperien also did a live demonstration with its mobile hard drive shredder truck, a fully equipped PoPI compliant truck that provides on-site degaussing and destruction facilities. This is the only truck of its kind in SA with this technology.
The truck offers mobile data destruction services that include the physical shredding of 300 hard drives, 500 data tapes, USB sticks and up to 400 mobile phones every hour. The mobile facility also offers the digital shredding of hard drives, solid state drives and data tapes and also the degaussing of HDD and tapes.
Vermaak says the main advantage this truck brings to data security is that it eliminates the need to provide a chain of custody for the client data because the truck comes to the client’s premises.
