Meeting ISM Controls: A Guide to Secure Media Sanitisation for Government Agencies

For Australian government agencies, adherence to the Information Security Manual (ISM), produced by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), is fundamental to maintaining national security and public trust. The ISM provides a comprehensive framework for protecting government information, and its guidelines for media sanitisation are stringent and precise.

Simply discarding or using basic methods for IT asset disposal is not an option. Government agencies require a highly secure, auditable, and compliant process that ensures classified and sensitive information is verifiably destroyed at the end of its lifecycle.

The ISM's Focus on Control and Verification

A core theme throughout the ISM is maintaining control over government data at all times. The guidelines for media sanitisation are designed to prevent data remanence—the residual data that can remain on media even after a standard deletion or formatting process. The ISM details specific methods for clearing, purging, and destroying media based on its security classification.

For a government agency, an IT asset disposal process that cannot be fully audited and verified against ISM principles represents a significant compliance failure and a potential security incident.

How On-Site Destruction Aligns with ISM Principles

An on-site data destruction service is the most effective way for a government agency to meet its ISM obligations for end-of-life media. This approach directly supports the core tenets of the ISM framework.

• Maintaining Control Over Media: The ISM mandates that agencies must control media throughout its lifecycle. By performing sanitisation on-site, the agency maintains full physical and procedural control over the assets until the data is irretrievably destroyed. The risk of loss or compromise during transit is completely eliminated.
• Using Approved Sanitisation Techniques: Our professional-grade Clonix systems are capable of performing erasure that aligns with the overwriting standards recommended in the ISM (such as multi-pass DoD 5220.22-M).
• Verifiable Destruction: The ISM requires that the sanitisation of media be verified. For any media that cannot be verifiably purged via software (due to errors or physical damage), our on-site physical destruction protocol provides the definitive, verifiable final step.
• Creating an Audit Trail: Our process generates an immediate, on-site Certificate of Destruction. This document serves as a crucial part of the audit trail, providing a detailed record of which assets were sanitised, by what method, on what date, and by whom, ready for any internal or external audit.

Sovereign Data Defence was founded by a leader with decades of experience delivering secure services to Federal Government departments. We understand the high-stakes environment and the absolute need for a process that is not just secure, but also fully defensible and compliant with frameworks like the ISM.