The Challenges of Depreciating IT Equipment The Importance of Proper Data Destruction with Rocco D'Amico

Rocco D'Amico shares his journey into IT sales and the evolution of his business, Brass Valley, which specializes in decommissioning data centers and providing data security. The conversation touches on topics such as the shift from on-premises data centers to the cloud, the cyclical nature of technology, the depreciation of IT equipment, and the competition in the hardware industry. They also discuss the importance of continuous learning and reinventing oneself in the ever-changing IT landscape. The conversation covers topics such as cost reductions in software, recycling of electronics, and the importance of high reliability systems and learning from mistakes. The guests discuss how software prices seem inflated and how vendors often offer significant discounts. They also talk about the challenges and regulations surrounding the recycling of electronics, including the responsibility of major manufacturers to recycle their products. The conversation highlights the need for proper data destruction and the potential risks of data breaches. The guests also share insights on the implementation of high reliability practices in their businesses and the importance of communication and mentorship.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:53

How's it going, rocco? It's great to get you on the podcast. You know we've been planning this thing for quite a while now at this point, and I'm glad that we could finally get together.

Speaker 2: 1:02

Oh, my thanks, Joe, for having me on. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 1:05

Yeah, absolutely so. Rocco, why don't you tell my audience how you got into IT? What made you want to go down that path? What's your background? Look like that path.

Speaker 2: 1:21

What's your background look like? Sure, well, I am an engineer by degree, so I'm wearing the team colors here today my Clarkson City windbreaker. I had been in manufacturing, I was a manufacturing engineer and I worked in engineering for many years and then I got married and I decided I kind of always had a bug to get into sales, and so I did. After I got married my wife said, hey, you better get this out of your system before we have kids. And so I jumped into sales and I started working with a manufacturer's rep as a manufacturer's rep and we were selling ASIC devices, custom electronics, so I was dealing with engineers all the time.

Speaker 2: 1:53

And then in 97, we adopted three children from Russia and it was an interesting time because the internet was just starting to sprout and manufacturing businesses were going by the wayside. So I find myself looking for another job and I saw the guys that were selling computers that were doing pretty good and I said you know what, I'll try that. And I couldn't move my kids because they were special needs kids. So it wasn't like I was going to be able to relocate. So I got into IT sales at that point and then I worked for several resellers. I did a lot of data center work. We were selling SANS before in the very beginning and multi-host connectivity and things like that.

Speaker 2: 2:35

And then. So at one point I said to a buddy of mine I said you know what, we could probably do this ourselves. And so we decided to get our own. We started to become a evaluated reseller and I started Brass Valley and shortly after that I'd sell maybe 500 servers to a bank and they'd say, well, you know, we're getting rid of 500 servers and you know the kind of data that we have on these, and would you, could you help us with these? And I said, well, not right now, but I'll look into it.

Speaker 2: 3:05

And that's when I looked into the computer recycling industry and I determined that the folks in the computer this is 22 years ago, it was like the wild west. So I just they weren't the people I could bring in front of my customers. So we decided to get in that business and, lo and behold, that's the one that took off. I developed a little proficiency with search engine optimization through Google searches. We started to pop up first on Google searches. One day a gentleman from a data security company found us and he was trying to find a vendor that could do things for him that nobody else would want to do in terms of data security, and so we said, yeah, we could do that, and we went out and figured out how to get it done, and so that's what sort of led to our heritage as the ITED provider for data security. I've since bought the business from my partner, and it's just me as the sole owner and that's my. I got to where we are partner, and it's just me as the sole owner and that's uh, that's my.

Speaker 1: 4:00

I got to where we are. Oh, so you? I mean you went from helping companies kind of build out their data centers to helping them decommission their data centers and probably migrating to the cloud, like that's uh.

Speaker 2: 4:10

I've gone nuts in this thing, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:14

I mean, uh, you know, it's interesting how you know the market shifted and you just you were just able to shift with the market. It's really fascinating to me because a lot of people they kind of get stuck like, oh, this has worked for the past five years, why change now? But those that don't change, they fall by the wayside.

Speaker 2: 4:39

Yeah, and it's interesting. I was at a hockey game actually this past winter and I was meeting with the president of Clarkson and we were talking about engineers and engineers that are coming out. His point was that an engineer was going to have to reinvent himself every two years in the future. I just think it's part of the. As younger people come out, it's what everybody's going to have to do. It's just going to be the standard operating system from now on. It's just life, I guess.

Speaker 1: 5:05

Yeah, I was actually talking to a friend of mine. I met several years ago at a credit bureau that I was working for and he was doing IAM. I was doing IAM and since then he's still in IAM, but he rose up through the ranks. I left IAM and I went and specialized in different areas of security and we were just talking and going through my experience, my expertise, and I've touched almost every domain of security. I've touched almost, you know, all of the top technologies in cybersecurity.

Speaker 1: 5:46

Not many, you know, not many people have, and I think that they get too complacent, you know, too complacent in terms of. You know, this is what makes me successful at my role at my company. Why am I going to change? I'm not leaving anywhere of. You know, this is what makes me successful at my role at my company. Why am I going to change? I'm not leaving anywhere. You know anything like that and you know, for me, I feel like I constantly have to reinvent myself, like right now. You know, I'm working on reinventing myself and getting my phd and securing satellites right and enabling them to communicate via quantum. So it's like, you know, taking it, taking my skill set and then magnifying it by, you know 10, 20 x, right. It's like well, let's see where we go, because I probably won't hit 20 x, I'll hit somewhere.

Speaker 2: 6:30

Yeah, you know up there, right, but it'll be different, it'll be better and one of the things I think is interesting, my uncle earl told me a long time ago, anything you learn makes something else easier to learn. So you sort of, once you start to get used to this and reinventing yourself, you get a broader perspective and it really builds up a momentum of its own, I suppose Right.

Speaker 1: 6:50

So yeah, it's really interesting that you bring that up. You know, that reminds me of when I was learning different languages. You know, in school, in high school, I started learning Spanish. I had a really bad Spanish teacher one year and it just like kind of ruined all of Spanish for me, like I just did not want to learn it anymore and I got, I think, like one class away at university from you know, meeting my requirement for like the foreign language and I'm like I know I'm one semester away at university from you know, meeting my requirement for like the foreign language and I'm like I know I'm one semester away and I literally don't care and I switched to German and uh it was so much easier for me to pick up German.

Speaker 1: 7:28

I mean one, you know, english is a Germanic language, so there's a lot of similarities, sentence structures, the same, you know where, where you find the verb can be the same, all that sort of stuff, right, um, but it kind of, you know, spanish kind of opened up my mind or started to like crack open my mind right to these other languages, these other you know cultures and whatnot. And so when I went into german, I went into it kind of with with a more open mind, I guess. Right, it's like okay, well, teach me how the sentence structure is. You know, the professor was like it's the same as english, like you don't have to worry about that. You know, like I rattled through all these nuances of spanish. They're like nope, nope, nope, nope. You know, you look, you look like this, you look for this thing, like, and it was like okay, all of this makes sense. Now I, I have the blueprint, let's learn some words, right?

Speaker 2: 8:20

No, I think you're absolutely right. It's funny too, because I grew up. When I grew up, my dad was a first generation American and my grandmother would speak Italian. So when I went to Italy I couldn't speak Italian, but I could pick up enough words where I kind of knew what was going on. But, oddly enough, when I went to Germany it was like the words were like you know, 15 or 20 letters long and it was like a sentence in a word, and I stumbled through Germany. But yeah, I think once you've got that blueprint in your mind, it stays and everything makes sense to you, right, yeah?

Speaker 1: 8:52

Yeah, germany is an interesting place. I'm trying to convince the wife that we should retire to Germany, but I got, like you know, 20, 30 years before we have to make that decision, so I got some time to convince her. Like I love Germany. You know, I always challenged myself, like when I was learning German right, I studied abroad for a little bit and I challenged myself to where, when I would go out, when I would go to a restaurant, when I would go to a museum or whatever, I was only allowed to speak German and if I couldn't figure it out, I had to ask a question in German for them to help me along.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Every once in a while. This only happened a few times, thankfully, you know. I would just get to a point where it was just like the extent of my german and I would have to switch to english and I'm like, look, I'm sorry, you know, I actually speak english. I'm here to learn german. I don't know how to say this and like everyone would be shocked because all of them learn english, like eight years old, all of them, every single.

Speaker 2: 9:57

at eight years old. All of them, every single one.

Speaker 1: 9:59

It's a requirement in their school, so whenever they meet an American, they get real excited. It's like oh, I get to test out my English against someone who speaks it every single day. A lot of them speak it better than us, oh yeah, yeah for sure.

Speaker 1: 10:16

To be completely honest, I met someone from France and he was in Germany learning German and he already knew German. He was in Germany learning English and you know we were roommates and he would like test out his English on me and stuff. I'm like, dude, you have nothing to test. Like you go to America right now. No one would even know that you're from France. You know, studied in Germany. Like no one would know. Yeah, you know, and it's just really interesting, you know, going over this and experiencing different cultures and everything Like I love. I love Europe yeah, I do too.

Speaker 2: 10:54

You know it's interesting too what I learned through the adoptive process. When we adopted the kids from Russia One was two years old, one was six, one was seven and the ability of my two-year-old to pick up a language, a new language, really struggle, because they had Russian ingrained in them and I have a theory that some people's brains are just kind of wired to learn languages better. They maybe retain some of that when they're like a little kid and some folks can really just it's amazing to me that people speak multiple languages. It really is, oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 11:36

That's such a fascinating just thing, you know. You see, there's this guy on youtube and he can speak like 17 different languages you know completely fluently.

Speaker 2: 11:48

They're not easy languages like this guy isn't going out there speaking german you know he's speaking russian mandarin.

Speaker 1: 11:55

He's speaking yeah, you know he's speaking different African dialects and whatnot. I mean, that's as hard as it gets. It doesn't get any harder.

Speaker 2: 12:05

Yeah, really.

Speaker 1: 12:06

And this guy is going into these cities and towns and he's speaking it just as well as they do and it's throwing them off. It's like wait a minute, what?

Speaker 2: 12:16

And, as you said, it's not only the words, it's the sentence structure's, like wait a minute, what? Like yeah, and as you said, it's not only the words, it's the sentence structure too, and the syntax and all that. That it's just I don't know how people do it. That's, that's their special gift, I guess?

Speaker 1: 12:27

yeah, that that's, that's the really challenging part of it.

Speaker 1: 12:33

You know, I, one of my roommates, was learning Japanese and he said he said the hardest part for him was that a lot of those I mean I don't want to call them symbols, right, because they're their sentence or their words or whatnot To us they look like symbols, but, you know, one could look exactly the same and there just be like a small dot, you know, somewhere, and that changes the entire.

Speaker 1: 12:57

You know meaning of it. It could be close to it, right, but it changes the whole thing and he's so like, it's so nuanced, like that. You know, there's like 300 characters or something like that in that language and he's just going to keep up after a while and it's understandable. But it's also, you know, really impressive, like you said, for someone to learn so many languages and learn the different sentence structures and you know what a verb looks like, what a noun looks like there, you know, because those are like the building blocks that you start to kind of piece together in your. We learned it so long ago in English. You know, we don't really care about, like where the verb is in a sentence.

Speaker 1: 13:44

You kind of piece it together. It's just, it's really fascinating. I don't mean to take this conversation down the path of different languages and whatnot.

Speaker 2: 13:54

I'll throw one more idea out there, because I've often wondered about it Languages and whatnot. I'll throw one more idea out there because I've often wondered about it. I've often wondered if languages and the way the sentence structures are put together and syntax and all that affects the way a given culture looks at the world or the way they make sense of the world as opposed, you know, when you get like somebody like Japanese versus English or whatever you know like, I wonder how much the language, how much the culture influenced the language and how much the language influenced the culture too.

Speaker 2: 14:22

Just, the way they see the world and the way they put things together in their brains.

Speaker 1: 14:25

Yeah, that is really fascinating, I wonder. I'm sure there has to be a study somewhere about that.

Speaker 2: 14:31

Maybe that guy that speaks 17 languages could figure it out. He probably knows.

Speaker 1: 14:36

Yeah, he'd probably be a good person to ask with that. You know, like that is interesting because, like in spanish, I'm pretty sure the verb like goes first, you know you, you learn about what's what's being done right at the very beginning, like the first word, and then you find out the context of the rest right, which is right, it's like accelerating and growing. You know that industry it's probably accelerating because the cloud is so competitive against you know your own data centers, that you own, right. It kind of doesn't make sense almost to have your own data center, which is a really weird thing to say, but we're moving into this place where you know it just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2: 15:41

Well, I have a couple of thoughts on that. One is I'm not directly involved with the cloud, but I speak to enough OEMs that tell me that a lot of the savings that people think they're going to get by transitioning to the cloud they just don't. They're not really there. That's number one. And number two. I don't know if you've read Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Tlaib, but he talks about he's the one that wrote the Black Swan Theory and essentially the essence of the book is that the more you centralize power, the more you centralize, in this case, data, the more fragile it becomes, and so I think eventually you're going to see one of the big boys go down for a significant amount of time, and I don't know who. I don't know when, but when they do, I think people are going to start to look, rethink more distributed data centers and things like that. I know that's not a popular opinion, but I could see it. I could see it happening.

Speaker 1: 16:42

Yeah, I mean, you know, just being in cloud security right now, you always hear kind of trickles right of that. A lot of people are very much cloud focused, cloud first and whatnot, but there's always someone out there that's a little bit more apprehensive, it's like man, maybe we should be multi-cloud, maybe we should be, you know, in the cloud, but we also have our data center. We have, you know, multi-region at least. Yeah, and I've seen it, where a lot of companies are going with, you know, like the most popular region, right, that makes the most sense for their company, which, of course, always happens to be like us east one, at least in the midwest, right, it's always us east one when you're on the midwest, uh, of the cloud provider. You know, I I mean the last, the last awage, for instance, right, it was something like 40% of the internet was down.

Speaker 2: 17:42

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:43

And you know people, I think people didn't quite see it that much. They saw it in some places, right, because I think these companies that have higher traffic, they're doing a good job of starting to go multi-region and multi-cloud and whatnot. But for a company that is 90% US East 1, that's your entire infrastructure if you're're all in the cloud right now. Right, I work for a large automotive manufacturer, or primarily an AWS, and I I couldn't, I could not tell you or name you anything about our data centers. I hear that we have them. I couldn't tell you a single thing about them, not, not one, not a name, not nothing, and so like, for me, you know, aws goes down, it's like, okay, well, I can't do anything, right, right, what do you want me to do? Right, it's a. It's an interesting world, you know, because they kind of sold us these solutions based on cost savings.

Speaker 2: 18:49

Right, and I'm not sure that's there. And I'm an old man now, so I remember, I'll tell you, when I went to school I was using punch cards with computers, so that's how old I am. And so I've seen the mainframe go to distributed computing and this is just like mainframe by another name to me. I just think these things tend to go in cycles. You know, we're just in the consolidation cycle and then we'll go through an expansion cycle again.

Speaker 1: 19:15

Yeah, it's interesting, you know, do you still have that other you know portion of your business, you know up and running right of supplying data center equipment? And then I wonder, I wonder if you're seeing that switch within your own business, like how, like you know, you identified right where people were migrating to the cloud. So they were like, hey, you sold us this equipment, can you decommission it? Yeah, Right, and now I'm wondering if you're seeing an uptick in the data center equipment being bought from you now.

Speaker 2: 19:53

Well, I'd say it's pretty well. We've always been sort of data center centric, but I think we're diversifying our business with more end user technology now, because you know we have to and it just kind of works out like that with our customers and what their needs are. We have to and it just kind of works out like that with our customers and what their needs are. I think that what we're seeing in terms of buying equipment, I'd say it's probably steady no-transcript for the hardware because most of the value is in the software and that's a difficult conversation to have with them. But it's all market-driven and people really get sticker shock when they see how much their equipment has depreciated on the open markets. It's been like that forever. It's not a recent phenomenon, but it's been like that forever.

Speaker 1: 20:55

It's one of the things we deal with. The depreciation of assets and things you spend your money on is pretty wild, especially right now with inflation being so high yeah Right. Like deflationary assets are just getting killed. Yes, yes for sure.

Speaker 2: 21:15

So yeah, I think that, in terms of buying equipment, the prices of equipment, I mean, it still follows the same model in terms of depreciation, but it's a steep. You know they talk about when you. They used to say, anyway, when you drive your car off the lot, if you bought a new car, it loses $1,000 the minute you drive off the lot. Well, it's a lot higher curve for IT equipment?

Speaker 1: 21:42

Yeah, I'd imagine. I mean, there's probably so much profit or overhead built into it. Yeah, there's a lot of profit as soon as it's put into use and it's software and it's in the software.

Speaker 2: 21:52

really, that's where a lot of the money is, and usually the secondary market. In the secondary market, most of the time you're not going to be able to find a company that wants to buy a whole array or a whole this or a whole that they want to buy. And so what happens is they get pieces imparted out for repair parts, uh, and so the repair companies use them so, and so that's what makes it uh, and if it's a newer device, then there's probably not a lot of demand for the repair parts yet.

Speaker 1: 22:20

um, it's interesting, I wonder. You know, in terms of competition with the hardware side of things, I would think that at least in 2024, right that the competition is pretty stiff, right? I mean, I'm thinking from a consumer PC side. You know, and when I'm building a new PC which I'm going to do here, you know, in a couple of months, you know, when you're looking at Intel and AMD, you can't go wrong with either, right? You know it's not like I'm going to buy an intel. You know cpu and notice a difference, and you know power on the computer and be like I wish.

Speaker 1: 23:03

I wish you're not gonna know you know right, like it's not even gonna, it's not even gonna matter. So, like I'm just saying, with hardware, as long as you're picking a good tier and you're understanding of that tier, of the brand and whatnot, it's probably pretty stiff competition. It's probably crazy on that side of it.

Speaker 2: 23:26

Yeah, we don't get exposed. I mean, I get to sit in on some meetings with the OEMs when they're meeting with my clients and it is. It's a dog-eat-dog world. It has been, it's always been that way, though that's nothing new. But I think what's going on now, like you said, with the inflationary pressures, you know, my groceries are going up, your groceries are going up.

Speaker 1: 24:07

Well, businesses' costs are going up too, and they can't necessarily pass it along to the consumer, and so it's got to come from somewhere. So now they're starting to push back against the vendors, I believe, and we're seeing that, to try to get any kind of cost reductions that they can. And I'm sure the OEMs are feeling that as well. Yeah, especially. You know, like you said, the money resides in the software, and as someone that makes purchasing decisions for my, you know, small section right of the company that I'm at these software prices. They seem made up, and the reason why I say that is because, like, okay, the bulk cost of this software is going into the R&D, the quality control process. Right, at least that's what I'm thinking.

Speaker 1: 24:39

You know, obviously there's some costs for, you know, development in terms of, you know, salary of the developers and time allocated and things like that, right. But I mean, the vast majority is R&D and quality control, and you know this happens every single time. Every single time I get a quote from a vendor that you know that I want. You know I'm typically pretty upfront with them, like, hey, look, you know our budget is in this range. If you come in at this, I am literally going to be obligated to like turn it down immediately. You know, I kind of give them a little bit of the upper hand, right like I kind of stack the deck in their favor a little bit and I mean they'll come back with a 90 discount yeah, yeah, you know and I'm sitting here like guys 90.

Speaker 1: 25:29

like you're giving me a 90% discount and you're still able to make money. Like you're still like I'm not taking food off of your kid's table and if I am, then please decrease that discount because, I'm not in that business, but it's like you wouldn't give me that number unless there was profit there for you.

Speaker 2: 25:53

You know you hope so I mean obviously we hope. So I mean sometimes the market is changing pretty rapidly Sometimes vendors do stupid things.

Speaker 2: 26:01

Number one, but number two, and I don't know the software model, that that much, but I do know that a lot, you're right, a lot goes into R&D quality control. They also need to do a lot of testing for operating on different platforms and it's a tricky, tricky business. But in the hardware business, in the software business, there's a lot of lift and shift where they give you a high number and then show a huge discount because they want you to see a huge discount, because everybody expects it. So it's part of the game, you know. It's part of the game that they play.

Speaker 1: 26:34

So you know to kind of shift gears once again, right, and talk about recycling of electronics. You know, walk me through what that looks like, because you said that you kind of opened yourself up to more consumer products, right, I assume like cell phones, like tablets I don't even know if any other company makes tablets anymore outside of apple. I think apple just killed the market for that. But, yeah, you know, let's talk about that a bit, right, because there's a lot of resources that go into an electronic that are very unique in our world. It's not like you can just manufacture them, like you have to mine these, these minerals and ores and things, um, and then you have to put them into an electronic and then, you know, a lot of people just throw it away, right, Like you.

Speaker 1: 27:24

You have this old phone every couple of years, right, you throw it away, you get a new one. Companies are incentivizing you to do that. Actually, yeah, we'll just start there, I think. What does that look like? And are you seeing an uptick in these? You know major manufacturers like Tesla and Apple going to companies like yours and maybe yours, right, getting those resources back to recycle.

Speaker 2: 27:53

Yeah, there's a lot of producer responsibility bills that are coming out in the States that create a framework for the companies like Apple and Dell and folks like that to be able to take back consumer electronics. Now my company we're a B2B company, so we're always working with corporations. Now my company we're a B2B company, so we're always working with corporations. But from the general consumer standpoint, most of the states have let's say, it might have trace amounts of mercury in it. So you as a consumer, you can dispose of that if you want. I really don't recommend that. I mean, you want to do the right thing, you want to be good stewards of the environment, but you can do that without any kind of penalty. When a company does that, they have accumulated so much of it that it starts to reach the universal waste laws. And the universal waste laws say we know that that laptop has mercury in it. And the LCD will say we know that the laptop has mercury in it and we are going to expect you to recycle that properly, are going to expect you to recycle that properly and if you don't, and your weight, they do this based on weights. The weights of the equipment that you have recycled don't meet that thing and you did it the wrong way, we reserve the right to prosecute you as a hazardous waste violator. So the stakes are higher as a large organization in terms of doing it the right way and making sure that you've properly processed that equipment. So there's an environmental aspect. And then the other thing that a lot of consumers don't have a good answer for is how do I get rid of that data that's on my computer? You know I've got credit card information and things like that and I don't know if there's a really good option for that for the consumers. And the reason is you know it's expensive to do it and people really you know it's expensive to do it and people really, you know they tend to not want to spend the money to get it done. But in the corporate world there's standards. There's NIST 800-88 that we would erase it to.

Speaker 2: 30:01

Some companies want their drives shredded, and what we're seeing in the corporate world as well. It started in data center and it's moving. It's really interesting. It's moving into workstations, desktops, laptops, but for years and years and years, like arrays specifically have been designed for speed and self-healing and so that means they've got buffer memory in them somewhere and all the sensitive information isn't just on the hard drive anymore, and so I'm seeing that work its way into laptops and desktops now, where you may have a solid state drive, but they've also got non-volatile memory in there too. From a data security company perspective, which we are, we need to make sure that we're not only getting the hard drive, but we're getting the information wherever it resides, whether it's on the hard drive, whether it's on NVMe, wherever it is. So those are the big developments in the industry that I think are going to be more prevalent as we go forward, especially with AI, because you're going to need more compute power. You're going to need it more on the edges. How do you?

Speaker 1: 31:08

ensure that you've got 100% of the data. You know, like, I'm just thinking from a security perspective of let's assume shredding is out of the picture here, right, because to ensure you know 100%, you would shred the device. Just from a security perspective, though, you know, if I'm really trying to hide something, I'm going to start putting it in memory. I'm going to start putting it in memory, I'm going to start encrypting it with a key that the memory is signed by, so you know others aren't going to know about it or identify it as something out of place. I'm going to hide it within picture files and things like that. That would probably be the easiest to actually get rid of, that. That would probably be the easiest to actually get rid of. You know, still, I think when I was in college, right, the recommendation was you know, run this disc wiper like three times on a hard drive and it's going to be, you know, a hundred percent gone.

Speaker 1: 32:03

And then you hear about the FBI there at eight right. And then when I fast forward a couple of years and I'm in my master's and they said, you know, it's really closer to 12. Well, what am I wiping? That's different between 1 and 12? That doesn't add up to me. That doesn't make sense and unintentional.

Speaker 2: 32:38

So if it's an intentional data breach, you've got a bad guy that's acting somewhere that's trying to get your information. If he were to try to do that, he's going to either find it on the machine, which means it got missed somehow, or if, in the case of, while you're getting eight pass, 12 pass. The reason why they say that is because they might have some kind of very powerful electron microscopes that they could put the drive under and look at the platters and look at where the ones and zeros were written and somehow back out of that. It's a really expensive spy kind of thing, Maybe the CIA, I don't know who does it, Maybe the NSA does it. But that's how they would do something like that. They would really have to have some very sophisticated kind of equipment that would be looking at the things at the I don't know what level, not molecular level, but pretty small. So it's not your average crook that's going to be able to do that. So that's the intentional side of it.

Speaker 2: 33:32

The unintentional side of it is what happens if people just make a mistake. What happens if they miss that hard drive. So we get do-it-yourselfers in our business that say we can't have. My customer will say we can't have any hard drives, leave the building, so we're going to pull them ourselves and we'll pull them ourselves and we'll have them shredded here and my guys might go in and shred it. But what happens when they miss a drive? What happens when? You know? I said to Joe, I said, Joe, I got that pile over there, I did that pile but I missed one and you never checked me, checked my work. So there's a human element to this, too that nobody's talking about except us, and that's, quite frankly, the thing that I think is going to be the next development in the industry is because there are standards in place, there are basic workflows in place that everybody knows, and there's certifications you can get, but they don't take into account the human element and they don't guarantee anything. So it's a multifaceted issue for sure.

Speaker 1: 34:35

I didn't even realize that you could get certifications in data destruction.

Speaker 2: 34:40

Yeah, we're certified with NAID AAA+, something like that. There's environmental certifications, there are 2v3. There's e-stewards. We carry all the certifications ISO 9001, 14001. None of those take into account the human factor. You got time for a little story how I figured it out.

Speaker 1: 35:02

Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2: 35:04

So my wife was head educator at Waterbury Hospital. I'd come home we have a tradition I come home for dinner and we talk about our day how was your day? Good, bad? So I'd be frustrated because I'd see mistakes, like just silly little mistakes, and my wife would say to me you know, you might want to really consider high reliability systems for your business. And I said, oh, that's really interesting, you know, like pass the potatoes. So finally one day I said tell me about that high reliability stuff, okay. And so she explained to me that it was originally adopted by the nuclear industry, then by the airline industry, then by the healthcare industry.

Speaker 2: 35:43

And what it is is it's a way to make to prevent catastrophic failures in any kind of a human environment where people are working together. Because they don't teach you this stuff at school, and to have it give you an idea what an impact it had in the healthcare industry. Like in 1999, the healthcare industry in the United States was losing like the equivalent of a 747 passenger jet every day in preventable deaths. That you know, just doctors making mistakes, nurses making mistakes. The communication wasn't right. So, like a 747 falling out of the sky every day. And you know, in subsequent years it was as bad or worse and they put these practices in place and they basically eliminated that, that kind, those kind of human errors. So I think it's the new frontier for data security. I honestly do.

Speaker 1: 36:34

Yeah, that's, that's really fascinating. You, you know, I've had people on previously that talked about you know how they're securing like next-gen aircraft, right, and how the, the, the system is designed in a way so where it'll overcome errors and like catastrophic errors and it prevents itself, you know, from you know falling out of the, from you know falling out of the sky, straight up, falling out of the sky because it hit some catastrophic error. They put in all these safeguards to protect it from that and it's really, it's really fascinating of how, how that came up, you know, kind of like in your, in your own discussion, right, because I never would have thought that that sort of system or protocol would be in place in a hospital.

Speaker 2: 37:23

Yeah, that's probably the last place that I would guess If you've been to a hospital, when they're checking your name and they're saying it two or three times and you're giving your birth date, that's all part of that process. You know it's all part of the double checks and it works. I've seen it work in my buildings. It's any kind of an organization that wants to eliminate mistakes. It's well worth looking into.

Speaker 1: 37:48

That's really that's fascinating. Like how do you employ that sort of mentality or process in your own business?

Speaker 2: 37:59

Yeah. So we've got a tool set that we use and there's an acronym, it's called CHAMP, and one stands for communication, effective handoffs, active listening, mentor each other. And I can't remember what the P is, but we do this. I do this presentation for the company at least once a year and then every morning at huddle we have a morning huddle and we go around the table for people that, and we want to positively reinforce it. So everybody has an input to say oh, I saw Joe doing this the other day and that's a high reliability event.

Speaker 2: 38:37

So we get this positive reinforcement mostly because there's negative parts to it too. You want to have a five to one ratio of positive reinforcement to negative reinforcement to negative comments, because part of this is mentoring each other, and so you want to create an environment where everybody's free to make mistakes but fix them and not try to hide them and not feel like you're getting picked on and not feel intimidated by the hierarchy of the organization. So we do it. It's a very open thing and everybody's on board. They know it and I expose my mistakes readily, because if they see me being open about it, they're going to be open about it as well, because if they see me being open about it.

Speaker 1: 39:19

They're going to be open about it as well.

Speaker 1: 39:20

I think earlier on in my career I was probably too open and too honest about my own mistakes and shortcomings.

Speaker 1: 39:27

You know, a more mature brain would not have, you know, said the things that I said or, you know, done the things that I did, right, and that's obviously a part of life and whatnot. But I'm looking back and I I have talked to this manager, you know, since then, and you know I just tell him, like man, the grace that you gave me, like no other environment would have ever given me. You know, the learning opportunity, the coaching opportunity right To you know in the meeting, say, hey, you probably shouldn't have worded it like that, you know, just say something like this. It's like okay, like even in my interview this guy was doing that. And you know, I got off the phone call and I'm like, yeah, surely, surely he's not going to hire me because you know he said I should have worded things differently. You know my prior experience. He's not going to, he's not going to like me, right, um, but then he hired me and the coaching kept going.

Speaker 2: 40:30

He's a good coach. He's a good coach, yeah.

Speaker 1: 40:32

That was, that was. You know, I, I I don't say this lightly, but that was probably the most instrumental coach that I've had in my career that really set me up for success. Not even you know, a year down the road. It's like no, like I'm still using those principles today, you know, and I'm using those principles to coach other people that are coming up.

Speaker 2: 40:54

Right yeah.

Speaker 2: 40:55

So, it's really fascinating. Yeah, it is, and that's the environment we want. We want that mentoring environment where everybody's mentoring everybody else and coaching and nobody's got to feel embarrassed or intimidated. And I've got a story about how this really paid off for us.

Speaker 2: 41:10

We had been contracted for an erasure job at a large company and my tech went on site and he was supposed to erase two arrays and while he was there, a customer said oh yeah, get that other one too. And so one of the principles is stop the line when you've got an internal smoke detector. When something's not right, stop the line. So he did. And he said are you sure? And the guy said yeah, I'm sure, just go do it. And this is you could be intimidated by a customer. Right, the customer shouldn't do it. Our guys want to please them. Right, you don't want to get in trouble.

Speaker 2: 41:46

But because of this training, he felt comfortable enough to say well, I need to go back to my supervisor to check this out.

Speaker 2: 41:54

So he calls up his supervisor, my GM, and the GM calls into the company at another level and they said well, whatever Steve said to do, go do it. You know, because he's down there all the time, he knows what he's doing. And so we erased that array. And then the next day I got a call from the vice president of that company that said, hey, rocco, he goes. I know the answer to this question he goes, but is there any way you can get that data back? And I said, han, there's no way we're going to get that back. And so the guy that gave the instruction he lost his job because of that. So not only is this a positive story in that my guy felt comfortable enough to stop the line and wasn't going to be intimidated by the hierarchy, but it's also another, you know, a moral lesson on the other side where, if they had high reliability practices on their end, they may have never made the mistake in the first place.

Speaker 1: 42:46

So that is. It's really that's. That's really just that's crazy. You know, and I do relate to that a bit on probably every level. You know, earlier on in my career, you know, I was just learning IT and they're giving you access to all these customers and these customers have, you know, data and databases. I'm still trying to figure out what a database is.

Speaker 1: 43:13

Right, like I didn't go to school for IT, right? So it's not like I took like a computer science class or anything. I steered clear of all of that stuff. Um, and you know, with a mistake, just a simple command that I thought was correct, right? Um, I had run it so many other times. I completely dropped their database and deleted it. Thankfully, you know there was a backup. Due to our high replication feature functionality.

Speaker 1: 43:45

It was going to start replicating over all those zeros to the to the backup um, and so you know, we had a policy on our team was when in doubt, raise your hand and get someone's attention. It could be someone lower than you, it could be someone the same level as you, or it could be the vp, right, yeah, um, get someone's attention and ask, and they looked at it 30 seconds in they're like, yep, do this right now. And they knew the background timing of that high replication feature. So we had, you know, a few seconds left and it was like, okay, we're going to disable that, like right now, and start failing them over. But, like, going through that experience, it showed me you know one. You know kind of that, that high. You know that, that high availability that we were talking about with that error reduction of.

Speaker 1: 44:39

Okay, there are certain times when I am more aware of what I'm doing. Right, when I'm in a database, I am triple checking everything you know, and I'm checking my notes, I'm comparing it to what's on my screen, I'm reviewing it. I'm having someone else come over and check and be like, hey, this is what I'm trying to do, this is the command I want to run, is this right? Yeah, and you know, as well as accompanying that with you know, get someone's attention, you know, ask for some advice, ask for some help, because there's a lot of people out there that would have encountered that problem. And actually, maybe a year after I encountered this issue, we had a new hire start at the company and this is someone that, in his interview, boasted about how well he knew Linux. How well he knew Linux. He knew it inside and out. He uses it in his day-to-day computer. You know which, you know, impressed everyone right, like he can name all the different you know system processes and whatnot.

Speaker 1: 45:38

Like he sounded, like he knew his stuff and you know, during the first couple of weeks he encountered a problem that he didn't know how to solve. That literally everyone else on the team knew exactly how to solve it within 30 seconds. I mean like it was literally. Like the longest part was like let me look up this command real quick. You know, because we've encountered this, we know what's going on. This guy spent eight hours, literally eight hours. It was his first call of the day.

Speaker 1: 46:09

Spending eight hours on something that would have took us 30 seconds and at the end we're like hey, man, you know you bringing issues to our attention at 4 pm when we're off at 5 is not cool.

Speaker 1: 46:22

If you get the call at 4, you know and you don't know what's going on, we expect you to escalate it immediately because no one wants to stay here longer. But we deal with critical software that impacts people's lives and safety, and so we will stay as long as we need to, right, like well, we want to have that opportunity to be like okay, the last hour, like we're scrambling, we're getting this thing done, right, yeah, but for him to wait that long and to not understand what's going on, it, you know, it's like hey, you know, it's like hey, man, you know, you may know Linux, but you don't know this application. Right, we know the insides and outs of this application and you probably know the system better than than we do, and that's OK. But like there has to be a point in time when you, you know, raise your hand and you're like, hey, I need an adult, right.

Speaker 2: 47:13

So someone come help me and you know, it might have been ego too. That got in the way. You know, for somebody like that and I want to go back to your original example too, because we talk about another concept called the Swiss cheese effect that's how one little problem can work its way through the cheese to become a big problem. An example was your database that was about to get written over by zeros.

Speaker 2: 47:35

That would have been if that gentleman wasn't there to stop that and raise his hand and say we got to pull the plug on this. That would be an example of something that starts as a little problem and it just kind of works its way up and before you know it you got a great big problem. And so it's just, it's fun. You know, the more I think about this, the more I just shake my head and say we ought to be teaching this stuff in school, you know, to kids. Really it ought to be just a way of life for us. But I'll have to wait till they start working for me, I guess, to learn about it.

Speaker 1: 48:07

You know, we really need to make the people that are coming into the field, we need to make them comfortable with failing. Yes, you know, like I mean've I failed so many times at that first role. I failed so many times, in so many different ways, you know, but by the end of my tenure there, I had the most robust troubleshooting guide that the company had ever seen that they still use today. Right, and the reason for that is because I failed so many extreme times. It's like I dropped a database, okay. Well, these are the three things that you need to do within 30 seconds of doing that, right, you know, and like it goes through literally the entire process and the only way that even that company had that knowledge is because I made the mistake.

Speaker 2: 48:57

Well, when you make mistakes, you're learning. That's how you're learning. That's it. Yeah, if you're not making mistakes, you're not learning anything, really Right.

Speaker 1: 49:06

Yeah, that's a very good point. You know, Rocco, this conversation has been fantastic. You know I really enjoyed it, so did I.

Speaker 2: 49:13

Yeah, so you know before I let you go. How about you tell my audience you know where they could find you if they wanted to reach out and where they could find your company if they wanted to learn more? Sure, my email is Rocco R-O-C-C-O at BrassValleycom and the company is Brass Valley, and you can learn more about us on the website. Yeah, if you have any questions about you know IT asset disposition or technology or things like that and data security aspects of it, please feel free to reach out. I love to have these conversations. I really do. Thanks so much, joe.

Speaker 1: 49:46

Awesome. Well, thanks everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode.