Nowadays, confrontation between nations does not necessarily result in armed conflict on the battlefield; economic warfare, cyberattacks, and struggles for raw materials are forms of conflict made more accessible by globalization and technology. Among the various arenas of confrontation, the control of digital data is undoubtedly one possible scenario. The Polish town of Wieliczka, located 10 km southeast of Kraków, is home to ProDevice – a subsidiary of Diskus Polska – which specializes in data destruction
EDR On-Line visited ProDevice as part of a study tour on the Polish Defence Industry organised by Polska Agencja Inwestycji i Handlu (PAIH), the Polish Investment and Trade Agency [1], and met Tomasz Filipów, the company CEO and founder of Diskus Polska, which was created in 2007.
The mother company is organised on three pillars, data storage, mostly based on tapes, data centres, the Polish company being specialised in cooling and optimisation, and finally data destruction, under the ProDevice brand, the subsidiary being founded in 2012. Due to the decline of magnetic tapes as data support, most companies engaged in tape distribution being on the verge of closing their activities, data destruction has become by far the most important asset of the group and was the subject of our visit. This doesn’t mean that tapes are unreliable: “A few years ago we did data consolidation retrieving data from 50 years old Cold War era tapes and we recovered 98% of the data,” Mr. Filipów said. Beside data which have become useless, the need to destroy data media forever comes when organisations decide to transfer data from old media to more modern ones, old ones needing therefore to become not only unreadable but the data they contain must be destroyed. Quick destruction of data is an issue when a facility is about to fall into enemy hands, should be criminals or military opponents; it is the case of embassies, scenes of bonfires lit in the courtyard of the diplomatic headquarters about to be abandoned to destroy classified paper documents have been immortalised both in real life and in numerous movies, military advanced command posts which are about to be overrun by the enemy having the same problem. A bonfire would not be anymore sufficient to destroy digital data.
“For data destruction we created ProDevice, which as Diskus Polska, is a 100% Polish company, and which business is all concentrated here in Wieliczka, including production as well as research and development.” Beside the Polish headquarter and main site, which was moved to Wieliczka in 2018, ProDevice has two other entities, Prodevice DACH in Dortmund, Germany, and ProDevice Corp. in Houston, USA. The name of the Dortmund office, DACH, (D for Deutschland, A for Austria and CH for Helvetic Confederation) is self-explaining, those three countries being among the main customers. As for the Texas-based entity, which was created with the support of PAIH, its aim was to penetrate the United States market. The situation in the USA has prevented to obtain major successes, for the time being, “therefore we are now concentrating our efforts on Poland and on European markets,” the CEO stated.
The success of the company is leading to an expansion of its premises, this needing also coming from the fact that part of the production that in the past was outsourced has been brought back in house due to some quality issues.
Destroying data is the last phase of data lifecycle; this starts with data capture, followed by data maintenance, data synthesis, data usage, data publication, data archival and finally data destruction. Many people consider destroying the media where data are stored equivalent to destroying data the same thing; once the media is destroyed, data are destroyed. “When you punch a hard disk drive (HDD) you just make it unreadable, but you can still access at least part of the data,” Mr. Filipów explains. EDR On-Line understood that physical destruction might make it difficult to retrieve data, however it cannot ensure 100% security. However, many customers still look for this solution, therefore ProDevice portfolio contains both hard and soft systems, as well as some combining the two.
In 2018 the company started to work on High Energy Impulse (HEI) technology, which proved to be the optimal solution to destroy data on USB keys, Solid State Drives (SSDs) and mobile phones. The R&D work involved Finite Element Method (FEM) and supercomputer analysis and was carried out in cooperation with several institutions: the AGH (Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza), the University of Science and Technology of Krakow, the NCBiR (Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju), the National Centre for Research and Development of Warsaw, and the ITE (Instytut Technologii Elektronowej), the Institute of Electronic Technology of Piaseczno, near Warsaw. ProDevice also cooperates with Solaris, the Polish National Synchrotron Radiation Centre. Currently machines based on HEI are serial produced, the company working to overcome the last step, which is destroying data stored on memories protected by metal cases. In the company meeting room, the third generation of systems was exhibited, but these may become soon overcome by next generation once the metal case problem will be solved. The HEI technology developed by ProDevice has been patented in Poland and in the USA. The company best-seller in this role is the ProDevice T1000 deflasher; the advantage of using this system is that data contained on flash memories cannot be recovered by any known and available technology, and the destruction cycle takes only 40 seconds, much less than removing data by software or shred the data media. Moreover, this does not damage the housing, which makes it possible to inventory it after the process. The high energy impulse is generated by energy stored in capacitors loaded at tension up to 6,000 V.
When talking of magnetic media, such as hard disk drives (HDD), magnetic tapes, floppy disks and other, a different method is used, degaussing. Here an intense magnetic field is generated by the machine, which alters the magnetic structure of the media, erasing permanently all stored information. Here too the process is quicker and safer that the two alternative modes, software and shredding. ProDevice produced its first degaussing machine in 2010, which is still working, and now the company is proposing two different machines: the ASM120, which can generate a magnetic field up to 11,000 Gauss and can generate an automatic report, and the ASM240(2T) with two operating modes, a magnetic field up to 20,000 Gauss, the reporting system being complemented by a camera that takes photos of destroyed media. Reporting is a key function, as sensitive data destruction process must be traceable and registered.
As physical destruction is still required, ProDevice is producing manual destroyers and media shredders. To achieve 100% destruction of magnetic media – first magnetically erasing data and then physically destroying the medium itself – ProDevice developed the ProDevice DAC, capable of destroying up to 250 HDDs or 3,000 other media units in one hour.
The company has also developed a series of systems to ensure safe storage and transport of data media, creating a full ecosystem that is able to solve all issues its customers may have. ProDevice provides full support to its customers via app, portal, and software support.
“Governments, armies, special forces, banks, tax offices, prosecutors, judges, railways, we have references in most of the fields,” Tomasz Filipów said. Apart from some components, such as capacitors that usually are acquired in Germany and Japan, the remaining of ProDevice products is made in Poland, the company producing in-house key components such as coils. CNC machines are lined up in the production halls and only non-critical items are outsourced, EDR On-Line understood.
Finally, ProDevice is part of a European Union sponsored project, known as Reeproduce. Its aim is to extract rare earth magnets materials from recycled system, among which data media, essentially HDDs. The project lasted 56 months and was concluded in April 2026, the working group made of 15 partners from eight nations being led by Sintef of Norway. No detailed information on results were provided. With a forecasted considerable increase of Neodymium and Dysprosium, Reeproduce aims at reducing the European dependence from import of material mostly in the hands of China.
With data becoming one of the key elements in all systems, including military ones, the capacity to destroy them in the most reliable way is becoming a major issue.
Photos courtesy ProDevice
[1] PAIH is the first point of contact for exporters and investors operating in dozens of markets globally. It provides free consulting to grow and promote Polish businesses. Among its missions, PAIH supports Polish companies in promoting their brands on export markets.
