Your company decides to start the business of selling toys online and shipping globally. The E-Commerce system that supports the new business will be developed in-house. The solution architect chooses to implement a RAID storage system composed of high-capacity and high-speed Solid State Disks (SSD). The development team is developing a security plan for the system. Given security is a priority concern, which of the following is the best to deal with issues of data remanence when retiring disks or the storage system?
A. Degaussing
B. Low-level formatting
C. Multiple passes of overwriting
D. Cryptographic Erase

Kindly be reminded that the suggested answer is for your reference only. It doesn’t matter whether you have the right or wrong answer. What really matters is your reasoning process and justifications.

My suggested answer is D. Cryptographic Erase.

According to NIST SP 800-88 R1 (Guidelines for Media Sanitization), there are three information sanitization methods: clear, purge, and destroy.

• Degaussing is not applicable to SSD.
• Multiple passes of overwriting and Low-level formatting belong to clear.
• Cryptographic Erase is classified as a purge.