Since the commencement in IT evolution, the retail sector has progressively made more and more use of the possibilities of integrating IT into point of sale (POS) to allow easy accounting and smooth, professional customer transactions.
With such confidential data as payment transaction records, financial history, secure login credentials and other general confidential information it is fundamental to your operation to dispose of such items in a secure fashion when it comes to a computer POS hardware upgrade.
With POS related devices, data isn’t solely restricted to the IT hardware, it is also retained on printer output thermal / paper receipt rolls stored in the output bin etc. If your organisation is considerably large, you’ll also make use of payment processing servers which contain countless sets of confidential information. Your organisations obligations under the data protection act, via your information commissioner’s office (ICO) registration is to establish and maintain a secure method of processing and destroying confidential data when the retention period has expired and or IT hardware needs to be disposed of. It is a common mistake to identify your duties as just ensuring secure processing of the data with disregard when it comes to disposing of the said hardware.
