Shredding is the only truly effective way to dispose of just about anything that contains sensitive data. And everyone around you probably knows that—but life is busy, and proper data destruction methods aren’t top of mind for most people. So files that need to be shredded stack up in cardboard boxes, and old devices are left in storage closets or thrown into garbage cans.
Holding a shredding event lets your company accomplish several goals at once (and it doesn’t mean you have to park a noisy shredding truck outside your building all day!). Sometimes a business will invite the public to a shredding event as a way to increase name recognition in the community; other times, a shredding event is just for the company staff. In many cases, a business will organize shredding because it has a backlog of old documents and/or other shreddable material to dispose of, and using a data destruction service is the most efficient and cost-effective way to safely destroy those items.
Your business can also use an offsite or onsite shredding event as the impetus for a company-wide clean-out and reorganization. A lot of offices have been underused and have become disorganized since the pandemic began and their non-essential workers went remote. If you know that your work site is filled with documents and other materials you no longer need, scheduling a shredding event can put some pressure on onsite employees to go through their desks, filing cabinets and storage closets and collect everything that’s just taking up space. Even local remote workers can participate and drop off any documents or data-storing devices that they’ve been using at home.
Organizing a Successful Onsite Shredding Event
Depending on its goals, budget and the physical limitations of its site, a company can generally choose from one of two models to host an onsite shredding event.
Sometimes a business hires a mobile shredding service to come set up in the parking lot for a predetermined length of time, and advertises the event through social media and word of mouth. During the event, company staff can shred any obsolete business documents and potentially advertise the company’s services to any community members who come by to have their documents shredded. (Community members generally pay a fee for this service.)
Holding this kind of onsite shredding event sounds easy, but it may create logistical issues for your business. Running a mobile shredding truck can be noisy, and you need to have a large parking lot or other accessible area where the truck can be set up for the duration of the event. There’s also the fact that mobile shredding trucks are only capable of shredding documents. If you have hard drives, DVDs/CDs, ID badges or other non-paper materials that need to be shredded, that may not be possible at an onsite shredding event. Plus, it may be more expensive to have a mobile shredding truck set up at your location for several hours than it would be to use an offsite shredding service.
Onsite Event with Offsite Shredding: Convenient and Efficient
Holding a successful onsite shredding event doesn’t require you to actually do the shredding onsite. There’s a hybrid option: Establish a place and time where employees and/or community members can directly hand off shreddable material to a data destruction company. At the end of the event, everything is securely transported to the shredding facility for destruction.
Organizing this kind of shredding event can be especially useful now that so many people are working remotely. Protecting your organization’s data security is even more challenging when employees are able to take data offsite. It’s not always enough to trust that your workers will shred documents or appropriately dispose of hard drives when they’re done with them. Overseeing collection of sensitive data allows you to verify that it’s properly destroyed.
There are two elements to running a successful event of this kind. The first is making sure that everyone within the company knows about it, and that they know what kinds of data and what kinds of materials should be shredded. Your data destruction policy may already include clear and specific guidance about things like how long certain documents should be kept. Send out an email ahead of time, clarifying the kinds of things that should be shredded vs. the kinds of things that should be kept.
The second element of a successful shredding event is partnering with a data destruction company. You’ll need the company to deliver locked containers beforehand. Employees can drop their materials into the containers during the event, and the data destruction company picks them up when it’s over. When Northeast Data Destruction collects locked containers from a client’s site, the containers are transported back to our secure facility on locked and GPS-tracked trucks. Because we know that clients may need to verify that their sensitive materials have been permanently destroyed, we may even be able to allow someone from your business to witness shredding. That way, you can watch the data destruction process from start to finish.
ReStore Shredding Event with NEDD
In May, Northeast Data Destruction supported the Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore by participating in their shredding event. People from the community who donated to the ReStore could drop off their documents, hard drives, and other materials to be shredded in our NAID certified facility. We securely collected, transported, and shredded a truckload of material for the community and helped the ReStore to raise funds for Habitat for Humanity’s programming.
How can Northeast Data Destruction help you organize an onsite or offsite shredding event that will help keep your business’s data secure? I’m happy to answer any questions. Contact me today!