Blancco offers data erasure tools. This area will soon be seen as important for compliance and archiving purposes.
Capabilities
- As readers may be aware, deleting a file is unlikely to really delete the information. Chunks of the information remain. It's hard to get rid of information.
- That's what Blancco does. Cutely, it describes itself as a offering "tools of mass data destruction." Typically every bit is flipped several times, randomly. Initially this was done at disk level, now it's also done at the file level.
Customers
- Main customers are PC refurbishers who clean up hard disks and PCs.
- Blancco is starting to sell to storage systems vendors such as Sun, HP, and EMC, so they can provide deep data expunging.
Company Statistics
- Profitable.
- Calendar 2007 revenues 2.4M euros ($3.6M), with 240K euros ($360K) net profit.
- Calendar 2008 revenues projected at $7M.
- 40 staff.
- HQ in Joensuu, an obscure Finnish town near the Russian border. Joensuu is fondly remembered by your correspondent as a place where he once went into the local supermarket and was amazed by the quality of design of everyday objects.
Clearly, Blancco has good opportunities driven by compliance needs. Defunct storage systems need to be deep cleaned. Today, they often aren't. This is a compliance disaster waiting to happen, millions of times over. Consider, for example, a bank's PCs, many of which contain sensitive customer information.
... David Ferris