Now open in Baltimore, Securis knows how to destroy data

Believe it or not, drilling a hole in a hard drive is not an effective way to make it unreadable.
“All these old ways of driving a nail through it or driving a drill through it just doesn’t cut it,” said George Parks, co-owner of the new Baltimore outpost of Securis franchisee, located in Essex.
“We’re an ultra-secure, environmentally responsible data disposition, data destruction and e-recycler,” Parks said. “We take care of hard drives, computers laptops, anything that’s an IT asset for companies and we destroy the hard drives through a shredding process, they send the equipment to be broken down.”
The franchisee of the decade-old data destruction firm, based in Chantilly, Va., opened for business in July. Securis also has franchisees in northern Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey and Philadelphia, along with southern Maryland and Maryland’s Washington suburbs. Parks’ franchise, which he co-owns with Dan Dodd, covers Baltimore city and Baltimore, Harford and Cecil counties.
Securis offers on-site and off-site asset shredding and degaussing, along with zero-landfill and zero-export disposal. Dodd came to Securis from years in real estate, Parks from sales positions in the sporting goods business.
“Dan and I saw this as a great opportunity with the advance of technology just skyrocketing and saw the need for it,” Parks said.
Most data destruction is ordered by businesses with sensitive records, typically in the healthcare and financial sectors, Dodd said.
“Generally anybody that has information on their computer, hard drive, that is sensitive data,” Dodd said. “So when the end of life comes around for the computer, hard drive, cell phone … that data must be destroyed.”
Securis technicians do the destruction either on or off-site. Either way, client companies get a report listing each device destroyed by serial number.
In addition to local clients, the Baltimore franchisee also does work under Securis’ contract with military contractor General Dynamics. The Baltimore area also offers numerous other potential public sector clients, like the Social Security Administration and Aberdeen Proving Ground. The proving ground is one of Securis’ roughly 50 clients in the Baltimore area.
“I think there’s a good mix of private sector, public sector opportunities for us, so that bodes well for the Baltimore market,” Parks said.
And with data breaches on the rise — like the recent theft of 1 billion passwords by Russian hackers — data destruction services like Parks and Dodd’s could increase in size. The electronics recycling market is estimated to be worth as much as $9 billion worldwide.