What To Expect From A Shredding Service

Posted by Texas Security Shredding
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Why should companies consider a professional shredding service?

Professional shredding services save businesses money and time, and protect their reputation. Several legislative acts mandate companies protect their information, and a professional shredding service ensures they can do so. Further, professional shredders aren’t limited to paper documents, which is good, because sensitive information can take almost any form. For example, a professional shredder can destroy:

  • Hard drives
  • Magnetic tapes
  • Optical disks
  • Microfilm
  • License plates
  • Pill bottles
  • ID badges
  • Uniforms

With these full-range capabilities, professional shredders can dispose of nearly anything that could result in liability.

Why shouldn’t a company just do its shredding in-house?

Some organizations attempt to shred their own information, but this usually proves to be the costly, inconvenient decision. There are numerous benefits to working with a professional shredding service, including:

1. Better shredding and better security – There can be no doubt when destroying sensitive information, which is why professional shredders opt for cross-cut equipment. Cross-cut shredding doesn’t just cut documents into strips, which is often all the office shredder is capable of. Instead, it reduces documents down to pieces that are impossible to put back together. There’s no chance of someone reassembling the document.

With a reputable shredding service, there is an established process to ensure critical information is handled securely. This process is recorded and can be made available to businesses, so everything is handled in accordance with federal information acts. It’s much more difficult to maintain this needed level of security when companies leave their shredding to in-house employees.

2. More time for your employees – When companies contract with a professional shredder, all the company’s employees need to do is provide everything that needs to be destroyed. There are procedures for this, but they are simple to follow and take little time. Contrast this with in-office shredding, which requires one or more employees to feed the shredder one document at a time. Worse, because these shredders are made with cheaper components, they aren’t as powerful and cannot handle bits of metal, like staples. These must be removed before operating an in-office shredder, wasting more of your employees’ time, which could be spent on more productive tasks.

3. More convenient for everyone involved – Destroying sensitive information is critical, but that doesn’t mean your employees will consistently prioritize it. Using an in-office shredder is tedious and extremely time-consuming. Consequently, there are often lapses in procedure and potential openings for liability. Even if the task is handled on time, there’s no guarantee that it will be properly managed.

These aren’t concerns with a professional shredding service. Professional shredders have a process in place that ensures consistency, so your documents are destroyed on time and to standard.

4. It will save money in the long run – In-office shredders are notorious for breaking down, and their inferior components mean you’ll have to replace equipment more often than you’d like. That adds up, and when you factor in lost productivity, the cost savings advantage is clear.

A data breach that results in exposed information is one of the costliest fiascos a company can be involved with, and a professional shredder reduces the likelihood of this happening. Just preventing a single data breach is worth it from a cost-savings angle.

5. It can also save your company’s reputation – Businesses may be able to recover fiscally from lax information security, but it may come with a reputation hit that can’t be resolved as easily. If a company doesn’t manage its information security properly, where else is it lacking? That dent to the company’s professionalism can hurt its image, and it can be caused by something as simple as leaving out a critical document. Those are the kind of mistakes professional shredders don’t make, and shredding services also have processes in place to catch those mistakes before they do any damage. Something as delicate as information security should be managed with precision, and that’s what a professional provides.

6. You can destroy just about anything – In-office shredders aren’t equipped for anything more than paper documents. That’s a problem for companies that back their data up on hard drives, because the only way to ensure data safety with a hard drive is to destroy it completely. It can’t be tossed in the trash, and even if it’s bashed with a hammer, someone may still be able to pull data off of the hard drive. Professional shredders are experienced with hard drives and other challenging materials, ensuring they are utterly obliterated before they are disposed of.

7. It’s environmentally friendly – Paper shredded by an in-office shredder isn’t going to be accepted by a recycling facility. Professional shredders, though, produce so much paper waste that recyclers will buy bales of paper pieces and recover it. Companies that reroute their paper waste in this way are contributing to a greener planet.

Companies cannot make compromises with their information security, so they should expect their shredding service to make no compromises, either. Your shredding service should be experienced in destroying a variety of documents and materials, punctual and efficient when they are on site. That adds up to cost effective information destruction.