Protect Your Information by Ditching Your Shredder

Cheap is Expensive

In my 20s, I went through several cars that were cheap but didn’t last over the long term. They were affordable to buy but expensive to maintain, and the biggest dilemma was knowing when to stop investing money into keeping it roadworthy versus ditching it for a better vehicle.

Your shredder may or may not have wheels, but could still be costing you more money than you think. It could even bankrupt your business and ruin your reputation. Sounds unbelievable, right? Unfortunately, it’s all too true.

To protect your confidential information, like so many others, you made the wise decision to actively implement a way to shred your documents before discarding them. At the time, the most affordable solution seemed to be to purchase a shredding machine from the local office supply store. Everyone in the office could operate it.

What you may not realize is that the shredder you purchased for all the right reasons is not actually protecting your business’, customers’, or employees’ information. In fact, it leaves your business vulnerable to a data breach, lawsuits, and government fines.

Find out why it’s time to ditch your shredder and consider something more affordable.

Shredder Performance

You may have noticed that with an increase in business, staff, and paperwork, your shredder may be working overtime—or not being used enough. These are common challenges with office shredders because of how much time your staff has to spend waiting to use the shredder, feeding pages in a mere two or three at a time to avoid paper jams, clearing paper jams anyway, waiting for documents to slowly pass through.

Or perhaps some employees are so frustrated they’ve all but given up on the shredder, leaving paperwork in piles and hoping someone else will shred them or tossing them in the recycle bin or trash can.

But you can’t just leave sensitive information vulnerable to the prying eyes of office visitors, disgruntled employees, the trash pickup employees, and everyone at the recycling plant or landfill, so what can you do?

You’re in luck, because there is a better way to shred.

Shredder Compliance

Many office shredders are not compliant with data privacy laws, and even if your shredder is, an unbroken chain of custody is nearly impossible to maintain with in-house shredding.

Consider the minimum requirements of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), which states, “Any person who maintains or otherwise possesses consumer information for a business purpose must properly dispose of such information by taking reasonable measures to protect against unauthorized access to or use of the information in connection with its disposal.” Other federal laws that govern data privacy include:

• The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA),
• The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and
• The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB)

Perhaps you are one of the very few businesses that complies with these legal requirements. Are you able to prove that if an auditor asks for proof? Without an outside party to verify that proper destruction has taken place, your company is at risk of being cited for non-compliance.

Shredding Expertise

It wasn’t until I invested in a higher-quality vehicle that I learned that it cost me far less in the long run. The same is true when you ditch your shredder and invest in the services of a professional shredding company. When you choose a responsible, local shredding company, you will enjoy these benefits:

• Regaining valuable employee time previously spent removing folders, paperclips, and rubber bands, feeding pages slowly into the shredder, clearing paper jams, and emptying the shredding receptacle
• No more repeated purchases of replacement shredding machines
• Piles of paperwork waiting to be shredded are replaced by locked shred collection containers where employees can simply drop documents and whole files for shredding
• Sound sleep at night because you know your confidential information was securely destroyed
• You get a Certificate of Destruction to prove your compliance with state and federal data privacy laws
• There’s no dilemma about how to discard your shredded material; a responsible shredding company will recycle all shredded paper

Knowing all of this, is it time to ditch your shredder?

GreenServ provides paper shredding, hard drive and media destruction, and product destruction services to businesses and residents throughout Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas. If you’re ready to ditch your shredder or have questions about shredding, give us a call at 662-533-0940 or complete the form on this page. We’re ready to help you protect your information!