It was during my third year at the company that we celebrated my Mom’s 70th birthday, with a family Lip Sync battle. We put so much effort into it, wearing ridiculous costumes, dancing, and lip-syncing to hits from the nineties. We filmed everything of course, to have a souvenir for the years to come, and uploaded it to the cloud to make sure it’s never lost.
The cloud. When I say the cloud, while I meant to upload it to my personal cloud account, I accidentally uploaded it to the company’s cloud, where I used to share all my technical articles. The best part? Everyone received a notification on each new publication…so yes, it happened, my CTO enjoyed watching my unique interpretation of “Love is All Around” by Wet Wet Wet.
While this incident ended up without significant damage (if you don’t count my dignity), classified information that falls into the wrong hands is a different story, with significant consequences.
Recent examples reported by CNN involve two special investigations into President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, for their handling of classified information.
I can spend a lot of time recommending security policies or data classification tools. However, no matter how you look at it, if it happened to Presidents of the United States, it could happen to you.
So instead of focusing on data spillage prevention, I’d like to focus on the set of actions that are required to handle those human mistakes. I’ll say it succinctly: don’t panic, and use CTERA to immediately perform Permanent Deletion.
CTERA Permanent Deletion makes it possible to delete data without the possibility of recovering it from any backup or snapshot. It also provides evidence for data deletion from any folder snapshot or device, which meets compliance regulations regarding the removal of classified data and the GDPR “right to be forgotten” (also known as “right for erasure”).
Permanent Deletion Wizard
So, you may ask, what prevents just any data from getting permanently deleted?
Great question! CTERA has built-in protections against accidental or malicious deletions. First, this is a special privilege that can be granted only to the system’s administrators. Second, we use 2-factor authentication to validate the identity of this administrator; and third, we make sure the entire operation is logged in our audit logs, together with each and every file that was deleted in this manner, ensuring that you will always be able to track permanent deletions, long after they have been performed.
Two-Factor Authentication
Oh, you’re probably still curious to hear who won my family’s Lip Sync battle. Unfortunately, this video was permanently deleted, and aside from our CTO, no one will ever be able to reveal this secret. But you can always try and ask him…
Learn more about Permanent Deletion in our knowledge base here.