Shredding Sensitive Documents

Identity theft, corporate espionage, these are crimes that have only grown over the years and they can do a lot of damage to someone's personal life and business. One of the important actions any organisation needs to take to protect that kind of data is to look at best practices for document shredding Brisbane.

You are required to protect that data

It is your responsibility to protect any data that has sensitive information. Businesses must "take reasonable steps to destroy or de-identify personal information that is no longer required." That is part of the Australian Privacy Law act 1988. It covers personal and sensitive information including a person's ethnicity, political leanings, memberships, beliefs, criminal record, health information and of course things like credit card data, banking and so on. You have an obligation to the people who have trusted you with that information. If you do not follow that, you can face significant fines.

Buy a shredder or use professional shredding?

So then you have a choice, you have a shredder in your office or several, and you use your employees to shred documents as they need to be destroyed, or you look into reputable document shredding services. There was a time when the kind of shredders you could get yourself were not that powerful and did not destroy the documents as effectively. They also could not handle other things that need destroying like DVDs or old disks. Now things have gotten better and you can pay more for something more secure. But how much you can shred is still lower compared to what a professional shredding service can handle.

Why a professional shredding service is best

There are a couple of options when you are looking at having someone do your shredding for you. You can keep storage bins on your site where you put the documents and then they bring a shredder on a truck and tip it in and you observe to see no-one has looked at the data and it is destroyed. That is known as mobile or on-site shredding. Or you can drop your documents off at their location, or they can come and collect and take it back to their shredding facility and you leave it in their hands. They will schedule destruction and let you know when it happened. You do not witness it, and you do not know how many different people have handled it. You have to trust the professionals.

When choosing between on-site and off-site it would seem on-site is more secure, and indeed you do pay a little more for that option since you can witness it and they come to you. But if you are dealing with a great service with an outstanding reputation then there is no risk to shredding off-site. Both document shredding Brisbane options should give you a proof of destruction. You can have either option scheduled for what best suits you.

Conclusion

There are a lot of good reasons to look into using professional document shredding services. Think about your volume, the nature of your data and consider your options.