When you own your own small business, you know how important it is to have security protocols in place to protect the data on your computers. Do you have the same level of security for your paper records?
Your customers trust you to keep their contact information, payment information and any other personal data safe from bad actors. It’s easy to keep active files in locked cabinets or accessible only by trusted employees, but sooner or later you’re going to have to dispose of outdated paperwork and inactive files.
Are you going to load up the old files on a cart, roll them out back to the dumpster and throw them in? Of course you’re not! Not only does that betray your customers’ trust, but it sets you up for devastating legal action if someone steals those records and uses the information for nefarious purposes.
You’re smarter than that, so what you’re going to do is shred your old paperwork. If you do this yourself, though, it’s tedious and time-consuming, and consumer-level shredders burn out quickly with heavy use. A better option is to partner with a commercial shredding company like Shred Confidential.
We’re a shredding company in Riverside that can securely shred all your sensitive documents. You can set up a regular schedule to have your documents shredded as they accumulate. You can also have large bulk collections shredded. For example, if you convert a large body of archived paper documents to a digital format, you’ll need to securely dispose of the paper, and we can handle that.
We give you the choice of either on-site or off-site shredding. That is, we can either come to your company and do the work there, or we can collect your documents and shred them at our facility. There are advantages and disadvantages with both options, so take a look at the following information and think about which choice might be best for your business.
On-site Shredding Services
The biggest advantage of having documents shredded at your business is that they never leave your property. They aren’t transported, and they don’t pass through a third party’s hands. You’ll have a secure, locked container into which all the documents you want shredded are dropped, then, at a scheduled time, we come by to shred them. You’re able to watch the entire process and verify that all the documents are securely disposed of.
This service is done to our highest standards, since it often involves our clients’ most sensitive material. When the information in your discarded paperwork absolutely must remain confidential, keeping everything in-house is the only way to maintain the strictest level of security.
The only disadvantage of having your documents shredded at your place of business is that it costs a bit more. This reflects the more personal nature of the service and the added peace of mind you’ll feel from seeing firsthand that the job has been taken care of.
Off-site Shredding Services
Off-site shredding lets you hand off your documents to our shredding company and leave the rest of the process in our hands. We take the responsibility of keeping your documents secure during the handling and transporting of the paperwork to our shredding facility. We also take responsibility for seeing that it’s securely and completely destroyed once it’s there.
If you don’t feel that you need to take the extra step of watching your paperwork being shredded, the off-site service offers “take it and go” convenience. Since we can bulk-shred your job at our base facility, you’ll see a cost savings with this choice.
The main disadvantage of off-site shredding is that there is a small risk of the paperwork being intercepted somewhere along the way from your company to our shredding facility. There is also a level of hand sorting that’s done at our facility before the documents are shredded, and that creates an opportunity for the documents to be compromised. Of course, we take all possible care to minimize these risks, but we can’t reduce them to zero.
What’s the Right Choice for You?
When you’re trying to choose whether to have your paperwork shredded at your place or ours, a big factor in the decision is the sensitivity of the documents. If your company deals with extremely sensitive information, like health records, or information that’s extremely valuable to thieves, like credit card numbers, the on-site shredding service is highly recommended.
If your documents are of a less sensitive or less valuable nature, you might rather have the benefit of the cost savings that comes with off-site shredding. Papers that have very little interest for bad actors and that could cause little damage if they were stolen may still have information that the customer would want kept private. You absolutely want to shred these documents, but you don’t need the maximum security that more sensitive paperwork requires.
Another factor to consider is the type of material you need to have shredded. It’s relatively easy to make paper documents completely useless, but it’s a bit trickier with electronic media. If CDs and DVDs, or even hard drives, are a significant portion of your scrap, having the shredding done at your company is your best bet. There are two reasons for this: you can verify the destruction of the materials firsthand, and you can avoid the risk of transporting materials that thieves are likely to see as richer targets than paper documents.
Contact Us
If you still have questions about working with a shredding company in Riverside, we’re happy to talk to you. Shred Confidential offers personalized solutions that take into consideration the type of shredding your business requires and the frequency of service you need. We’ll give you our best advice about whether having the work done off-site or at your company makes more sense for you, and we’ll give you all the information you need to have confidence that you’re doing the best for your customers and the best for your business.
