According to top executives from 300 companies, the security of company records is one of the top five critical problems facing businesses.
Whether that information you’re holding on to is yours or your clients’, keeping confidential data secure should be a top priority for your company. Storing documents you no longer need can compromise your identity, and even result in a data breach.
To keep yourself, your company, and your clients safe, here are nine reasons why you should invest in shredders with level 6 shredding to properly destroy and dispose of unneeded sensitive documents.
1. Avoid Corporate Espionage
If your company has invested time and money into researching and developing a new product or service, that information could be incredibly valuable to competitors. If one of your competitors got access to your confidential ideas or future plans, they could possibly jump in ahead of you and develop those ideas themselves. This would result in a major financial loss for your company. Commercial paper shredders can help prevent this possibility.
2. Protect Yourself and Others from Identity Theft
Identity theft is an increasingly common crime, with criminals sorting through garbage bins looking for personal information to exploit. Even finding an individual’s address could put the individual at risk, because the thief would have a much easier time applying for a credit card in their name that way.
3. Keep Business Information Confidential
Companies typically document just about everything that happens, from business meetings to staffing details to sales figures. Imagine what could happen if these got into the wrong hands. Using level 6 shredding will give you and your colleagues the peace of mind in knowing that no one’s rifling through waste paper trying to find exploitable information.
4. Maximize Storage Space
Some businesses continue to hold on to documents and papers that are several years old, simply because they’re unsure how to dispose of them safely. Paper can take up a lot of office space, so by having these destroyed and disposed of by level 6 shredding, you’ll be able to free up space.
5. Save Time
Instead of using a shredder, some people try to rip or cut up unneeded documents manually. Besides putting you at risk for paper cuts, this takes a long time. Using secure paper shredders can save you time as well as the stress of dealing with unsecured information or expensive data breaches.
6. Keep Employees Happy
Supervisors keep confidential documents with details that directly impact their staff, such as redundancy details, wage reviews, disciplinary information, and salary scales. If a staff member discovered even a rough version of a document about them, this could cause suspicion and distrust to filter through the entire team, harming morale. By having potentially destructive documents shredded and thrown away, you can avoid upsetting your employees unnecessarily.
7. Maintain Consumer Trust
When a company destroys private documents containing details about their clients and customers, they increase the trust their people have in them. By having all sensitive and unneeded documents shredded, and making sure your clients and customers know this, the people who keep your company in business will feel confident that they can continue to trust you with their information.
8. Eliminate Fire Hazards
Paper burns easily, and having an excess of papers stacked up all over an office can dramatically increase the chances of a fire -- not to mention a fire’s severity if one is caused. By keeping only the documents that are necessary to have on hand, you’ll help eliminate that fire hazard.
9. Keep Within the Law
According to the Data Protection Act, a company must properly destroy confidential waste -- such as salary details, contact information, and medical records -- to be legal. Documents like these should be shredded before being thrown away to make sure private information stays private.
As you can see, you have several reasons to trust level 6 shredding with your paper waste. From preventing identity fraud to obeying the law, these are just a few of the reasons why proper data disposal is so important.