Here’s a sad fact. We know that there are a lot of companies out there who don’t shred their documents. True, there are less now that GDPR has basically made it a requirement, but there are still some rebels who don’t follow the rules. But what we find sadder than that is the sheer number of businesses who still do their shredding in-house. For 99% of businesses, this is a hugely inefficient process (unless you happen to be a shredding company), wastes a lot of time and isn’t that secure. But those businesses persevere, because they believe it’s saving them money. After all, they’re not paying a company to do it, so it’s not costing them anything, right? We’re here today to tell you just how wrong they are.
Data Security
DIY shredding might seem like the better, more secure option, where you can just feed a document through the shredder as soon as you’re done with it, but really, it’s anything but. Shredding in an office lacks a lot of the necessary security controls and processes to protect confidential information, which increases the risk of breach, which in turn would incur all kinds of costs, financial or otherwise. The only way to ensure complete security is to outsource to a professional with all of the qualifications and protections needed.
Reassembly Risk
Despite the widespread message, many office shredders are often nothing more than simple strip shredders, designed to make paper waste smaller without really protecting it in any way. In fact, we covered this in detail in one of our previous blogs – why strip cut risks your business – which you can read here. But essentially, strip cut pages can be simply reassembled, giving any criminal willing to go through your recycling bin access to all the information they would want on you, your business and your customers.
Proof Of Destruction
Under the GDPR, you are required to provide a full audit trail of every piece of data you have on an individual. You are also required, if asked, to destroy that information completely and irretrievably. When it’s in paper form, nothing does that better than a shredder. But here’s the kicker – you have to provide proof that the data was actually destroyed too. Not easy to do when it’s gone through the office shredder. But by using a service like ours, you will be provided with a certificate of destruction that confirms you have met your legal obligations or secure destruction.
Efficiency
Most office shredders are fine with paper, but they often can’t handle things like staples, paperclips and binders. To shred in your office, you would first have to spend time painstakingly removing all of these things to ensure just paper goes through the machine. You then need to split the shredding into smaller piles that the shredder can handle, since many office shredders can only cope with small numbers of pages at a time. And then there’s the time and effort of feeding the paper in, emptying the paper bin and putting it into recycle. Frankly, don’t you have better things to do?
Wages
This one is really simple – DIY shredding requires someone to physically do the shredding. And employees who spend time shredding have less time for the tasks they were hired to do. So in one way or another, you are still paying for the shredding to be done – and often the wages are much higher than the fees of an outsourced shredding company.
Maintenance
Shredders require maintenance. Ongoing repairs, servicing and attention to make sure they run properly. If a staple ends up lodged in the mechanisms, it’ll cost you a pretty penny to get it repaired. But with an outsourced shredding service, you don’t need to worry about any of that.
Volume
During bust times of year, like the end of the financial year, the amount of paperwork and documents that you need to shred will suddenly skyrocket. But your little office shredder can still only do 5 pages at a time, which leads to a lot of frustrated hours slowly feeding documents through a shredder and wondering why you’re bothering.
Employee Error
Finally – people make mistakes. Without policies, processes or training, mistakes are inevitable. Whether that’s missing a paperclip and causing damage to the machine, shredding the wrong thing or not shredding something, errors do occur. Over 874 security incidents every year are caused by employee error or negligence with data. Don’t let yours be next – hire an expert instead.
So what are you waiting for? Stop trying to cut costs (and actually increase them with the effort) and start protecting your business. Outsourced shredding with an expert like us is a simple, painless and cheaper alternative to taking on all that risk and work yourself, plus it’s better for the environment too! For more information on outsourcing your shredding needs, just get in touch with Greenaway today.
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