QSGI Develops Breakthrough Process to Quickly Erase Data on Enterprise Storage Systems from Manufacturers Such As IBM, EMC, HP, Hitachi, Dell, and Sun
New on-site process can provide data centers the ability to ensure data security without compromising the value of the equipmentHIGHTSTOWN, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--QSGI, Inc. (OTCBB: QSGI - News) the only data security and regulatory compliance provider offering a full suite of life-cycle services for a corporation's entire IT platform, today announced that it has developed a breakthrough in its audit and data erasure process which allows its data security and compliance division to quickly and efficiently audit and erase tens or hundreds of drives in enterprise storage arrays from major OEMs, including IBM, EMC, HP, Hitachi, Dell, and Sun. This new process has the flexibility to audit and completely erase all IDE, SCSI, Fiber Channel, SSA/SAS and SATA drives, at speeds up to 4 terabytes of data per hour. With this high speed bulk storage array erasure offering, QSGI is now providing for its clients on-site directly at their data centers, its complete suite of data security & regulatory compliance services including comprehensive asset management reporting, re-marketing, and complete data security.
QSGI CEO Marc Sherman noted, "QSGI now has the ability to simultaneously erase tens, or even hundreds, of hard drives in storage systems as fast as a single drive. We can readily achieve an outstanding sanitizing speed of 1 terabyte of data in only 15 minutes, while offering data centers complete data security and regulatory compliance at their facilities, while preserving the integrity of the owned or leased hardware for subsequent full re-marketing value recovery. This is especially important for machines that need to be returned to leasing companies in the same condition as when they were shipped new."
Preventing ID Theft !
Before getting rid of your old computer consider the personal information inside it being handed to thieves. Insight with Seth Grossman, QGSI President & COO and CNBC's Joe Kernen.
The reality of identity theft Computer users upgrade to newer PC technology every four years
Gartner, Inc. estimates that consumers refresh their personal computer technology an average of every three to four years. Most PC users recognize that a computer contains toxins that are regulated by the EPA and they prefer to recycle their old PC and prevent it from ending up in a landfill.
Some plan to sell the computer and others will donate the computer to charity. Whether the computer is to be recycled or you plan to dispose of your computer, one must face the reality of identity theft.
Identity theft is reaching epidemic proportions with over 700,000 cases reported last year. The average identity theft victim will spend $3,000 repairing their credit history. Good people with a solid credit record are spending months cleaning up the mess caused by identity theft.
In the meanwhile, identity theft victims may lose job opportunities, be refused for loans or may get arrested for crimes they did not commit.
Other resources to learn about identity theft
The Federal Trade Commission: National Resources for Identity Theft
Privacy House Clearinghouse: Identity Theft Resources
Department of Justice: Identity Theft and Fraud
CastleCops: Security Professionals
Before you sell your computer, donate your computer or dispose of your computer, protect your personal identity with eraseyourharddrive.com.
2006: The Year of the Data Breach?
December 27, 2006 - NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The nation may remember 2006 as the year the Democrats won the mid-term elections, Gerald Ford and James Brown died, and data breaches made an indelible mark on American business in general and the insurance industry in particular.
As the year draws to a close, security experts report that high-profile data breaches, growing sophistication among cyber criminals, increased media attention and unprecedented legislative activity have changed perceptions and practices around identity theft.
“More has changed in the world of data protection and identity theft over the past year than in the prior six or seven years combined,” says Troy Allen, chief operating officer in the fraud solutions practice at Kroll Background America Inc., a Nashville, Tenn.-based employment screening company. Allen specializes in data breaches and thefts.
Allen attributes the spike in reported data breaches to more use of electronic data in day-to-day business, less expensive data storage options, proliferation of laptop computers and portable memory drives, and weak policies and procedures by businesses.
Meanwhile, more organizations are beginning to recognize what data breaches look like and are responding, Allen says.
He lists five factors that caused shifts in the ID theft landscape in 2006.
1. Government gaffes--The Veterans Administration loss of 26.5 million records, and data loss by big agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service and The Department of Agriculture, and small entities, like local school districts, captured the attention of policymakers and the public. “Scrutiny of the VA breach raised the bar for everything,” says Allen.
2. Regulatory requirements—Twenty-five states passed laws related to identity theft and members of the United States Congress introduced 34 bills pertaining to the subject. Most of the legislation called for notification of individuals whose data was exposed. Now, even where notification is not required, the public expects it and no longer seems willing to consider breached businesses “victims.”
3. Organized crime--Identity theft is tied to organized crime, and proceeds finance drug operations, illegal immigration and other criminal activity. Crime rings are training people to steal data and providing easy and profitable channels to market the data. “There’s now an online auction to buy and sell identities, where you can even read reviews of the sellers,” says Allen. “This is way beyond smash-and-grab laptop theft, because criminals are learning they might get as much as $40 per clean identity.”
4. Educated consumers—Large-scale efforts by the Federal Trade Commission and others have helped teach consumers to protect their personal information. More people are reluctant to divulge their identification to businesses and organizations that don’t need it. Even employees are getting savvy and demanding employers use proxy numbers instead of Social Security numbers. “There’s progress, but there also are still a lot of bad practices to be remedied, and it’s not changing fast enough,” according to Allen.
5. The Growing “Business of Identity Theft”--The demand for identity theft and data protection services has created an explosion of companies marketing identity-theft related products and services. Some are experienced organizations with security expertise, but others are questionable Internet or telemarketing operations that have sprung up overnight. False promises and marketing by fear are tainting the industry, says Allen. “Consumers need to understand that--although some businesses are offering guarantees--when it comes to protecting identities, there is no such thing. Period,” he says.
Just as 2006 brought increases in awareness, confusion and uncertainty, Allen predicts 2007 will produce its own trends., including the following:
1. Corporate preparedness—More companies will assign individuals or cross-functional teams the responsibility for data security and breach response. Employee training will increase, too.
2. Corporate restrictions--More companies will limit the use of computers and data devices, like flash drive USBs. Some businesses will disable the capability to download information. “Portable memory and CD downloads are conveniences--not necessities,” says Allen. Employers will begin insisting that more information exchange takes place via secure online transfer.
3. Social engineering crimes--Criminals will look for more efficient ways to get larger amounts of data. One scheme that is gathering momentum is bribing employees or planting employees who stay in jobs only long enough to steal records. Such criminals are tough to catch, because they use stolen identities when they apply for positions, Allen says.
Company zips away computer files 4
Corporate, private clients rely on QSGI to erase hard drives containing sensitive dataBy BILL MOONEYEAST WINDSOR -The kinds of stuff the folks at QSGI stumble across would make CEOs at major companies break out in cold sweats.
"We've found it all," said President and Chief Operating Officer Seth Grossman. "It would make your head spin."
The employees at this 5-year-old company on Lake Drive aren't dealing in incriminating photographs or mislaid stacks of cash. They're dealing in what in the 21st century has become the true coin of the realm: information. Specifically, the techies at QSGI specialize in erasing data permanently from computer systems.
But in addition to wiping clean the computer networks of Fortune 1,000 companies, QSGI also buys equipment to be converted for resale and many times finds that hard drives were not erased as completely as their former owners believed. Instead, those systems still retain sensitive data such as Social Security numbers or financial data about clients. "There are major entities that thought they were doing it right," Grossman said. "That's a great entree for us."
QSGI pledges Department of Defense-level certified data erasure, erasing a hard drive to a nonrecoverable state, and documenting it for the customer. Then QSGI refurbishes and sells the old hardware and splits the revenue with the customer. Less than 2 percent of the machinery they service ends up as trash. Most is refurbished and resold.
"When we are done," said company founder Marc Sherman, "the customer gets a very detailed description, the model number, the serial number, the hard drive information, and it says erased to a DOD standard, with a certificate of erasure."
Sherman, a 43-year-old Trenton native, took a curious route to such cutting-edge work. His grandfather and father were in the scrap metal business in the days when the state capital was still an industrial powerhouse. But by the time Sherman entered the field, Trenton's heyday as a manufacturing mecca was on the wane.
"I got more involved into doing silver recovery from hospitals," Sherman said. Reclaiming silver from X-ray film, and precious metals recovery overall, proved lucrative until silver prices fell in the 1980s.
"And I heard there was a demand for people to process big IBM mainframes for precious metal values. We were bringing in millions of pounds of mainframes and there was copper, steel, brass, gold, platinum inside these mainframes. We were really a recycling business.
"One thing led to another. We went from William Sherman and Sons Scrap Metal to Electronics Processing Corp. of America."
The change encompassed more than just a name. "I took a family business from $6 million to $150 million," he said. Eventually, he sold the business, took a year off, and moved his family to Palm Beach, Fla., where they still live. Meanwhile, he saw security issues becoming more important to the computer field and a new business took shape.
He began Windsor Tech in 2001 as an IT solutions company, purchased a mainframe remarketer called QualTech International in 2003, and QSGI evolved from that into a company that last year had gross revenues of $36 million.
But whereas most successful multimillion-dollar companies would gladly boast of their client list, at QSGI, mum's the word. "If we've never had a data breach, why should we expose ourselves," Sherman said is the attitude expressed by their clients. "If we do our job right, you'll never see their name."
So in announcing new business, QSGI tends to remain cryptic, such as earlier this month when QSGI announced it had won a contract and described the new client not by name, but as a U.S. subsidiary of a Paris-based financial institution, a business whose parent company employs more than 90,000 people worldwide.
QSGI has about 100 employees in offices in Palm Beach, New York City, Portsmouth, N.H., Eagan, Minn., and in a nod to the global aspect of the information age, a sales office in Delhi, India. A peek inside their unassuming office, a 40,000-square-foot site in a corporate park in East Windsor, offers a view of quiet efficiency as a crew of techies inside a warehouse-sized structure methodically erase data from machines.
The business of erasing data has advanced beyond the unsophisticated days of slipping a floppy into a machine, pressing a button and assuming it worked.
"You can't do it in your garage anymore," Grossman said. "A competitor slips a disk in and says, 'The data has been erased.' Someone forgets to do the erasure, or more than half the time they haven't erased. Ours is server-driven because there is human risk. This doesn't allow us to miss anything." They also have a de-magnetizer on site, which can wipe a computer clean of every last scrap of information. "You don't have the risk that software didn't work."
With major companies discarding old computers every three or four years, and with an estimated 130 million personal computers being trashed this year, that is a lot of bank accounts, proprietary formulae and personnel files at risk.
Recent changes in the law mandate that employers ensure such data does not fall into the wrong hands. Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability & Accounting Act and the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act all deal in some form with maintaining confidentiality of client data, and in some cases levy heavy fines for violations. A company breaching the Gramm act can incur a $100,000 fine.
"People say their information is encrypted," Sherman said, "but who holds the encryption key? The guy you just fired? You can't change encryption all the time. Codes can be broken and it is not that difficult. People have to understand you have to be concerned with the end-of-life cycle (of computers)."
Understandably, clients might worry about the mere act of transporting to a QSGI office the very material whose security is of concern. Grossman said they do a lot of their computer cleansing work at the client's office. "It eliminates risk."
For higher-volume clients, QSGI has two methods.
A tractor-trailer is driven to the customer. Inside is a carousel similar to the type seen in dry cleaners that can hold and service 180 computers. For a mid-volume customer, QSGI personnel bring what they call the "suitcase," albeit one weighing 140 pounds, that can service up to 24 units at once.
QSGI has not forgotten individuals with home-based computers. A company Web site, eraseyourharddrive.com, offers people the ability to wipe clean their hard drives before recycling their units.
"People thought computers were the end-all, but they never thought about information that resides on computers," Sherman said. "Some companies don't want to spend money on security. But how much is it worth you to damage your brand? We've been preaching this to our customers for the last six years," he said, adding that companies are listening to their advice.
And the company's financial picture has been improving as a result. For the second quarter that ended June 30, QSGI reported revenue increased 70 percent, to a record $15.2 million. Gross profit rose to $3.1 million, compared with $2.1 million in the same quarter of 2005.
Net income for the quarter ending June 30 was $305,000, up from a loss of $431,000 in the previous quarter. Total revenue for the quarter was $15.1 million, compared with $8.9 million in the same quarter of 2005.
As more companies have started paying better attention to computer security, competitors have started to spring up, but QSGI personnel feel their head start and track record serve the company well.
"What we do makes good sense," Grossman said. "You don't want your R&D going out the door."
PHOTO CAPTION: 1. Computer technician James Cooper works erasing data on hard drives at QSGI Data Security and Compliance. QSGI pledges Department of Defense-level certified data erasure, erasing a hard drive to a nonrecoverable state, and documenting it for the customer.
CREDIT: 1. MICHAEL MANCUSO / THE TIMES
Data Center Maintenance & Security
QSGI Announces New Data Security & Compliance Business with Major International Financial InstitutionQSGI INC. today announced that it has signed a contract to provide its full suite of data security and regulatory compliance services to the 5,000 employee U.S. subsidiary of a Paris-based financial institution. The parent company has more than 90,000 employees covering operations in over 90 countries worldwide, including corporate and retail banking, asset management, and investment banking services
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This is a tremendous win for QSGI, with a leading financial institution and one of the top names in international investment banking," stated Marc Sherman, chairman and CEO of QSGI. "We will provide our complete suite of data security services to the client's growing U.S. operations, at multiple locations across the country, and look to expand across the institution's many international offices going forward. Banks such as this are a focus for QSGI due to the sensitivity of their data and strict compliance requirements."About QSGI: QSGI is the only data security and regulatory compliance provider offering a full suite of end-of-life and other life-cycle services for a Fortune 1000 corporation's and government client's entire information technology (IT) platform. QSGI offsets its clients' expenses through its value-added remarketing program. Prior to resale, the company utilizes its proprietary Department of Defense (DOD) level certified data sweep to eliminate otherwise recoverable data. QSGI reduces its clients' potential liability by ensuring regulatory and environmental compliance for IT products. QSGI also maintains and provides services on enterprise-class hardware, including mainframes, midrange servers, tape storage products and disk storage products. Given the sensitive nature of the company's client relationships, it does not provide the names of its clients.
Statements about QSGI's future expectations, including future revenues and earnings, and all other statements in this press release other than historical facts are 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and as that term is defined in the Private Litigation Reform Act of 1995. QSGI intends that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and are subject to change at any time, and QSGI's actual results could differ materially from expected results. QSGI undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect subsequently occurring events or circumstances.
