It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, who your customers are, or how big you are: your organization has a great deal of sensitive information to protect. Media shredding is one of the strategies you should be using to help safeguard that information. As data breaches become more and more common, every organization needs to be vigilant about using media shredding as a data security measure. Here’s everything you need to know about how media shredding services keep your data safe.
- Media shredding marks the end of the data security lifecycle.
Every piece of information your organization gathers has a security lifecycle. From the moment you receive a new employee’s Social Security number or a new customer’s banking information, it’s your responsibility to protect it from unauthorized access. Your organization needs to keep track of where every piece of private information is stored. You use passwords, locks, security systems, and other measures to protect all that data while it’s under your control.
Media shredding is the final step of the lifecycle for data you no longer need to keep. Shredding lets you clear out those records so you’re no longer responsible for protecting them. That’s especially important if your organization has any data destruction compliance requirements under HIPAA or another regulator. If you’re ever audited, you’ll want to be able to prove that you shredded certain kinds of private data in accordance with your obligations. Media shredding could even contribute to operational efficiency. Whoever manages your IT security can focus on safeguarding and monitoring access to the sensitive information that you actually need, not a bunch of obsolete records that are just taking up space in storage. (Plus, your customers and employees would also prefer that their data be destroyed once you’re done with it.)
- Media shredding makes your data completely unrecoverable.
There are a lot of DIY ways that people have tried to destroy things like hard drives and other external storage drives themselves. Aside from the obvious injury risks of trying to do something like drill or burn a hard drive, these data destruction methods are also incomplete. Digital information isn’t erased when the device storing that information is broken into a few pieces. Media shredding rips apart the platters or memory chips that hold the data inside your storage drives. The tiny shredded pieces all get mixed together with thousands of other shredded drives for recycling. There’s virtually no chance that any materials you shred can ever be reconstructed or linked back to your organization.
- Media shredding can help prevent financial theft and the physical theft of sensitive information.
Media shredding services can destroy a lot of other kinds of items beyond hard drives and other storage drives. Think about objects like access cards and fobs that unlock building doors, former employee ID cards, unused company credit cards, and even old employee uniforms. In other words, anything that someone could potentially use to access locked areas of your property, or to misrepresent themselves as a member of your team. Collect these kinds of company-issued items from departing employees and use media shredding to destroy them.
- Media shredding services (should) use many layers of security to protect your information once it leaves your possession.
When protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access is your goal, it might be uncomfortable to hand that information over to strangers. Reputable media shredding services are extremely security conscious for exactly that reason. Customers need to be able to trust that there are checks and balances in place to ensure no one will access their data before it’s destroyed.
Shredding services should be able to prove they take security measures including:
- using locked and GPS-tracked trucks to transport materials
- background checking new employees
- running 24/7 security monitoring throughout the shredding facility
- welcoming scheduled visits from customers who want to verify the facility’s security or witness the shredding process
Media shredding services may also choose to seek voluntary certification by industry associations. As an example, Northeast Data Destruction earned and maintains NAID AAA certification, granted by the International Secure Information Governance & Management Association. These optional certifications are only awarded to service providers who can prove they comply with all data destruction best practices.
MEDIA SHREDDING PROTECTS YOUR SENSITIVE DATA
Northeast Data Destruction knows that your organization can’t afford a data breach. Protecting your sensitive data is part of protecting your reputation and your financial future, so you can’t take any risks around disposing of obsolete records. Always use media shredding to permanently destroy hard drives and other data-storing devices that you no longer need. To learn more about our shredding services, contact us today.