Embodiments of a system and method to perform a secure deletion of a set of data from a remote cloud computing system are described. As described, in some embodiments, a user of a cloud computing service that provides data storage may securely delete his stored set of data by acquiring elevated access privileges to the stored set of data, designating at least one most significant bit in at least one data block therein as a sentinel and recording its value and position, updating the value of the sentinels and thereby rendering the data unusable, and verifying the success of the operation by checking the new value of the sentinels against the original value. In some embodiments, the verification process may be repeated in order to ensure that the data has been rendered useless across all nodes of the remote cloud platform.