There are a lot of reasons why even small businesses elect to work with shredding services instead of doing shredding in-house. It’s certainly more convenient to have a service come and take away locked bins of your shreddable stuff, compared to maintaining your own shredder and having employees feed obsolete materials into it one by one.
A commercial shredding facility also has equipment to destroy materials that a noncommercial shredder could never handle. That’s important because sensitive data moves through businesses in so many forms these days. If your business is going to maintain the highest data security standards, your shredding service should be collecting a lot more than just obsolete paper files.
Let your shredding service dispose of:
- Address labels and other packaging labels. Your business might receive dozens of packages a day. Before the packaging is broken down and trashed or stacked with other cardboard, do employees remove the address labels? These labels may include information about your business, your vendors/customers and your accounts with your shipping service. Any time a package arrives with a label that’s easy to remove, the label should be removed and put with your other shreddable materials. (Cover non-removable labels with thick Sharpie lines to black out any information.)
- Canceled and voided checks. This one might go without saying; you probably wouldn’t toss a voided check in a trash can or open recycling bin. But there’s no harm to making sure that any employees who handle checks know they should always, always be shredded.
- Post-It notes and scratch paper. Forget the formal documents in your filing cabinets: Often your business’s most sensitive information is actually kept on ripped and wrinkled scraps of paper. Employees might jot down passwords and account information on Post-Its that stick to their computers, or scribble notes about proprietary company secrets on scratch paper during meetings. These kinds of notes shouldn’t be left in trash cans or open recycling bins where anyone walking through could see them.
- Junk mail. Granted, the likelihood that data thieves could seriously harm your business using your junk mail is pretty low. This is one data disposal issue that’s about employee efficiency as much as it’s about data security. Instead of making them sort through the stack of junk mail that arrives every day to separate the credit card offers (for shredding) from the pizza menus and catalogs (for recycling), direct all junk mail to the office’s locked shredding bin. Once your business’s paper waste has been shredded into tiny pieces, your shredding service can recycle materials responsibly.
- Employee IDs and access badges. If it’s an item that could help an unauthorized person access your business, or present themselves as being associated with your business, you don’t want to risk throwing it away or letting it sit around in storage for years. Move former employee IDs and access badges into locked containers for shredding as soon as they’re collected.
- Payment cards. Like shredding checks, this one might seem pretty obvious—and yet, mistakes happen. Don’t be so focused on protecting your business’s financial security from digital hackers that you get lax about protecting physical cards from theft.
- Electronics. Anything that has a hard drive has the potential to store sensitive data. Even your office printer has a memory. Depending on what type you have, hackers who buy or find your old machine could theoretically access a treasure trove of documents that your business printed or scanned. A quality shredding service has commercial shredders that are powerful enough to rip through hard drives and other electronic components, destroying them completely. The metal and plastic elements of your obsolete electronics can be separated out from the drives and recycled as part of responsible e-waste disposal.
- Off-spec or defective products and other proprietary materials. Any business that makes or sells its own merchandise has to have a close relationship with its shredding service, because off-spec or defective products can’t be allowed to enter the “gray market” and sold second-hand. If you throw away a load of defective products branded with your name, and they’re later sold at a flea market, unhappy customers are going to look to you when their products fail. That’s just one example of why off-spec products should be shredded instead of thrown away. Ultimately it’s all about protecting your company’s intellectual property and maintaining control of your reputation. If you have any sort of physical material to get rid of, and you wouldn’t want anyone outside your business to take possession of it, have it shredded for peace of mind.
Northeast Data Destruction collects a wide range of materials from our customers for shredding. From delivering locked containers to your facilities, to providing certificates of destruction when your materials have been destroyed, we make it easy for your business to follow shredding best practices. Contact me today with any questions about our shredding services.