Secure document storage is extremely important especially for companies to keep a lot of sensitive information about clients and customers. Making sure that these documents never get out to the public or to someone with ill intent is the responsibility of the company holding the documents. This is why document shredding services are so crucial. Part of secure document storage is being able to offer secure shredding services once the papers are done. This can be done at onsite shredding services or secure document storage and shredding can be done at a secure off site location as well.
Sometimes secure document storage and shredding should be done off site because this offer is just one more layer of security. The papers that are being shredded can never be linked back to the company because no one will know where they came from. However some companies are more comfortable with the documents being shredded on site so that they know that the process was completed and the papers will be disposed of in a secure manner. You may not consider secure document storage and shredding as important as people say but here are a few reasons why you should always shred documents.
Identity theft
This is a real problem in the United States. Employees and customers alike as well as your business needs to be protected from identity fraud and theft. One way that thieves steal identities is by going through trash and digging up old ID cards, credit cards and documents to find out people’s personal information.
Customer protection
There are reasons that people would want to find out someone else’s personal information even if they are planning on stealing their identity. Just one example that was encountered recently was a man going through divorce proceedings and the brother of his ex wife actually went through his trash and found his personal information and was able to fabricate false documents in an attempt to help his sister get out of the marriage with more than she deserved. Just make sure that your customers are protected at all times if you have any of their sensitive information written down.
Space saver
You don’t really need all of the papers that pileup in your office. If any of those papers have sensitive information on that they should not be there the first place and will need to be shredded but even some regular papers that are just notes, records and generally unnecessary documents can take up a lot of space. It’s a good business practice to be organized and to know where everything is and if you have paper sacked up everywhere it’s going to be difficult to locate something when you need it. Shredding all of the unnecessary documents that you had will free up a lot of space for things that you actually need.
Legal reasons
Another reason to shred people’s personal and secured information is that simply said, it’s the law. Legally, businesses are required to comply with regulations regarding document shredding and secure document storage. There are severe penalties that will be set in place if the lock and soon you uncooperative or mishandling customer information. Heavy fines, business shutdowns and even jail time can follow depending on the severity of the situation.
Shredding is not that big of a deal or hassle and can be made even easier to hiring a company to do it for you. All you have to do is schedule a regular pick up of bins of papers and the shredding company will make sure that all of the information is disposed of securely and properly. They can either install economy sized shredders in your office and come and pick of the shredded document bags every week, or they can actually take the papers away for you and do the shredding somewhere else before securely disposing.
Of course, you want to make sure that you find a company that you can trust and that will not do you wrong but that is fairly easy to find. You can either do that by an associate’s referral or look into the reviews of each company and find out which one has the best reputation for the type of secure services that you are going to be needing.