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“I use a shredding service, I don’t need a shredder”

Shredding services offer a few benefits such as ease of use and resources, however in many cases it could be that your data is no more secure than if you placed it straight in the bin. Your sensitive internal documents are for your employees to see alone but by using an external company your documents are not only leaving the building but being handled and seen by someone else you don’t know. By handing over your documents to an external party you are losing control. Consider this, if you had all of your home bills and receipts, credit card statements and other highly personal documents in a box and a stranger showed up at your door offering to dispose of them for you, would you hand over the box? Of course not you would want to shred the items yourself and know that the job had been done properly and the remnants disposed of safely.

On-site shredding service?

Some companies do offer an on-site shredding service, however this does still mean that your documents are taken out of your building as the shredding machines they use still have to be transported there in a vehicle. Shredding services operate in bulk and are not motivated by security but rather by processing as much as they can is as little time as they can for as cheap as they can. This combination of speed and lack of care does not transfer well to the area of data security. It only takes one mistake or lack of interest in your companies security for you details to be left lying around.

Cost

If you hire in outside contractors to destroy your data this will be a constant cost for as long as you use them. In fact the cost is only ever likely to increase. Depending on your needs you could buy a good quality shredder and instigate a company shredding policy for a fraction of that yearly cost. Most shredders come with at least one year warranty and Fellowes are so sure about the cutting blades on their shredders they will cover that part of the machine for up to seven years! With the initial purchase of shredding machines and some employee training you could save your company a lot of money.

You are still responsible for your data

Many shredding companies will offer you a certificate of destruction, unfortunately this certificate in no way covers you legally for data theft or misuse. Your data no matter who says they have destroyed it remains your responsibility at all times. The only way to know for sure that your data has been destroyed safely and securely is to destroy it yourself. Even if your data is stolen after you have given it to an external specialist you are still liable for that data.

 
Data Protection Act 1998.

According to the data protection act documents that should be destroyed are:

For business:

Personnel Details - Salary information, employee data, pension details, banking data.

They even go so far to say that most sales and marketing data, production and manufacturing data and most print outs and photocopies of everyday standard should be shredded.

For the home:

Financial - Bank statements, utility bills , phone bills.
Personal - Letters, any correspondence that has personal information including your address.


Don’t forget that you may have sensitive data on CD’d or DVD’s which can also be shredded in the right shredding machine.

We offer shredders for all security levels and needs and are happy to advise you on what shredding machine would be right for your business or home.