How does your team handle secure file erasure for compliance?
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Been thinking about this a lot lately — most teams either rely on OS-level deletion or full-drive wipe tools, but neither really covers targeted cleanup (specific files, cloud drive residue, browser traces) for GDPR/HIPAA-style audits. Curious how others handle this in practice — is it a tooling gap, or more of a "nobody owns this process" problem in most orgs?
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i like the focus on targeted erasure because that is where things can get complicated. My biggest question would be how you verify deletion from backups and synced locations without accidentally removing data that still needs to be retained.
@bradely_charlesbois Good question, and it's the part most people get wrong when they think about erasure.
You pick the exact target — a folder, a drive, a synced cloud location, one backup set — and that's all that gets touched. Other backups, retention copies, anything outside your selection, none of it is even in scope.
Once the erasure runs, the tool goes back and checks the target to confirm the data's actually gone, not just flagged for deletion. That gets written into a report — what was targeted, what method ran, confirmed or not. So you're not just taking someone's word for it.
As for retention — since you're the one picking the target, anything you need to keep simply isn't part of that job to begin with. There's no risk of it getting caught up by mistake.