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If you've recently made the decision to transfer your data center to the cloud to reduce your overhead and help ensure redundancy, it's time to start thinking about what you'll do with the data center itself. After all, as you migrate everything to the cloud, you won't have need for that infrastructure and equipment anymore. Instead of wasting unnecessary storage space keeping equipment you won't be using, here are some tips to help you determine what to get rid of and how to do it safely.

Figure Out What You Can Get Rid Of

When you're dealing with data centers, you've got a lot of valuable equipment and information. If those things fall in the wrong hands, they can jeopardize your company's intellectual property. For example, you'll have hard drives in your servers that, if not wiped properly, could store residual data that can put you at risk.

Before you decide to dispose of or sell any of your infrastructure, think about what it could have for information. Things like those hard drives need to be scrubbed to ensure that the data cannot be recovered. Then, you can sell them or donate them.

Equipment like the cabinets, monitors, racks, and other similar items don't provide you much benefit in resale or donation, so they should be disposed of. Unfortunately, you can't just throw them in the trash. They can contain hazardous content, such as mercury, so they need to be handled correctly. Your cloud service may be able to recommend a hazardous material disposal service that can help you address these properly.

Decide How You Want To Deal With Data Wiping

As stated above, wiping the data off the hard drives is vital, but it needs to be done in a way that it cannot be recovered later. Many business owners decide that once they've moved everything to the cloud, they can just send those drives to an offsite destruction service for sanitizing. This may be more time-effective and less expensive, but it does increase your security risk. Any time you send your data offsite for cleaning, you have no way to be sure that the data is not breached somewhere along the way.

Instead, talk with your cloud service about the possibility of onsite data sanitization. By doing it onsite and having the data destroyed locally, you can be more confident that it's been done safely, completely, and correctly.  

Put Your Plan In Place

Once you make that final determination about how you want to deal with the equipment and the data, it's time to put a transition plan in place. Work with your cloud service to ensure that everything is migrated correctly first. That data migration plan should be in place first, then you can detail the plan for eliminating the data on the drives and dealing with your hardware. With everything in writing, you can establish a clear step-by-step timeline for the whole process.

Hire A Disposal Team To Help

It's challenging to try to do the data migration, drive destruction, and equipment disposal all on your own, especially if you don't have the expertise for it. Once you have your plan in place, your cloud service can help you to connect with the services that you need to complete the entire migration, including destruction of your existing infrastructure.

Migrating to a data center cloud provides you with access to your data no matter where you are, ensures some redundancy from automatic backups, and enhances your system reliability. With the tips here, you can not only reap these benefits, but also reduce your overhead by eliminating unnecessary equipment in your building.