Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) Practice Exam 2025 – All-in-One Guide to Mastering Your Certification!

The purpose of the degaussing process is to demagnetize magnetic media and erase data. Degaussing involves the use of a powerful magnetic field that disrupts the magnetic domains on storage devices such as hard drives and magnetic tapes. This disruption effectively renders the stored data unreadable, as it alters the physical properties of the magnetic media where the data is encoded.

This process is crucial in data protection and security, particularly when devices are being disposed of or repurposed. By ensuring that sensitive information cannot be retrieved from the magnetic media, degaussing is a vital step in preventing unauthorized access to data.

Other choices, while they touch on different aspects of data management and security, do not relate to the actual purpose of degaussing. Enhancing data access speed pertains to performance improvements rather than data erasure. Securely backing up data is about preserving data integrity and availability, and compressing large data files relates to storage efficiency rather than the elimination of the data itself. Thus, these options do not capture the specific function and importance of the degaussing process in terms of data security.