Degaussing (for orgs who do it) is just as operational a task as updating. There will be an SOP that covers data storage decommissioning. It's not as frequent, but it's not any less 'normal', certainly not ad-hoc or one-off. You don't invest in a degausser "just in case".

No, that's not what I meant. I was referring to tasks you might perform regularly on the same machine.

You don't go ahead and erase the same disk once a week. Decommissioning isn't something that occurs for the same project, once a month.

Its not the same operational process.