How To Protect Your Business With Shredding
Effective document destruction is a must for every business today. From protecting brand reputation to ensuring compliance and minimising the potential for fraud, there are many benefits to working with a shredding partner to ensure that no documents or data fall into the wrong hands. If you’re looking to better protect your business these are some of the ways that shredding will help you to do it.
- Fraud protection. From obsolete files through to employee records, documents present many opportunities for fraudsters to exploit security loopholes in your business. Corporate data theft is a burgeoning trend, as it enables valuable information to be exploited by those who want to profit from it. A secure shredding service protects your documents - these are kept in lockable consoles until shredding day arrives and then destroyed on site so that security risk is minimised.
- Compliance with regulation. Today, stringent penalties exist for organisations that don’t take steps to protect documentary data - as well as information in items such as memory sticks or old files. The GDPR, for example, applies strict standards to UK companies when it comes to destroying data-filled documents - with fines that can be as high as €20 million or 4% of turnover for those who fail to comply. You can protect your business from these penalties with secure shredding.
- Avoid productivity issues. Shredding takes time and effort if you’re managing it in-house. Staff you’ve employed for a totally different skill set may have to take time out of their day to remove staples, unclog machine blockages and deal with shredding waste. This is often a total waste of talented people and can affect individual productivity. You may also find that staff resent having to spend time on shredding when they could be applying their talents elsewhere, meaning that motivation is affected too. It makes much more sense to leave shredding to the professionals and give your staff the opportunity to shine at what they do.
- Streamlining costs. Many businesses opt to shred in-house because the perception is that this is the cheaper option. However, the reality is that this is often far from true thanks to all the hidden costs that can come from shredding in-house. In addition to the cost of employee time required for shredding, there is the expense of the upfront investment, ongoing maintenance, electricity costs, disposal bags etc. It can actually be much cheaper to use a shredding service with a predictable monthly cost.
- Meeting sustainability commitments. No business today wants to be accused of not doing enough when it comes to sustainability. Find a shredding partner with a recycling commitment and all your paper waste will be sustainably processed - not sent to landfill - and your business's green credentials will improve.
Using a shredding service makes life much easier - and more sustainable - for any enterprise today. It will help to protect your business against a lack of compliance, the potential for fraud, productivity issues and spiralling costs, among many other things.