The Facts About Shredding In-House or Hiring A Professional

I know we would like to think with today’s technology we would be using less paper but the facts are paper usage is increasing every year.  Companies receive and create documents every business day. You’re sending letters, making proposals, generating invoices just to name a few of the tasks that you use paper for.  The mail comes every day and you are receiving letters, bills, payments and countless other documents. Some of these documents need to be kept for a period of time and others are read and can be disposed of right away.  Since more than half of every document has some information on them that privacy laws require they be shredded before they are disposed of it pays to play it safe and shred all documents when they are no longer needed.

So now you know you need to shred records and you have two choices. The first is to shred the documents in-house or the second choice is to hire a professional shredding service like FileShred.  So how do you decide which way to go? Here are some facts to consider about in-house vs hiring a company like FileShred. After we hope you will agree that hiring an on-site shredding service in the way to go in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

1. In-House  Shredding is More Expensive

When you consider of what you pay each of your employees now think about one of them sitting for hours and hours in front of one of those small office shredders feeding just a few sheets of paper at a time through the shredder so it doesn’t get jammed.  Now think about how many more productive things they could be doing for your business. When you factor in all of those costs you’ll find that hiring a mobile shredding service is the way to go.

2. Document Shredding Services Offer A Greater Level Of security

Most shredders you can buy at an office supply store are strip cut shredders which means that it cute the paper into long strips that are easy to reconstruct.  If you can buy a cross cut shredder it will destroy them but it takes so long to do your documents may be sitting around unprotected for days.

With a professional document destruction service they will supply you with locked containers to put any of the business records you want destroyed can be safely stored until they are destroyed by their industrial shredder.

FileShred is NAID AAA Certified. That means we exceed the highest standards in the industry for security and professionalism.  To maintain our AAA Certification we must pass regular, unannounced audits to ensure that we properly dispose of our clients’ documents.

3. A Professional Shredding Services Will Make You Compliant With Privacy Laws

Personal identifying information is often collected by businesses and is stored in various formats–digital and paper.  Most states have enacted laws that require private entities to destroy, dispose, or otherwise make personal information unreadable or undecipherable.  That means shredding.

The Federal Trade Commission’s Disposal Rule also requires proper disposal of information in consumer reports and records to protect against “unauthorized access to or use of the information.” The rule applies to consumer reports or information derived from consumer reports. HIPAA also has disposal requirements for protected health information.

In-house document destruction can be risky for companies when it comes to compliance. By outsourcing your document shredding to a NAID AAA Certified company, you can ensure compliance and provide your customers with the comfort of knowing that their records will be handled properly and destroyed in accordance with the law.

4. Professional Shredding Services Can Destroy Paper and Electronic Records

Identity thieves and corporate spies know how to recover electronic files even after you have deleted them on your hard drive.  You must have the hard drive physically destroyed so the files can never be accessed again.

Hiring  shredding service will make certain that your electronic records have truly been destroyed. You won’t need to worry about someone being able to access them because the NAID AAA service provider you hire will follow security standards that perform and document the complete destruction of your electronic records.

5. Outsourced Shredding Services Will Help You Have A Consistent Shredding Schedule

With all the things you and your staff have to do every day with operating your business it pays to hire a service that makes a task easier and better for your company.  A document destruction company will put a scheduled service in place so the secure destruction of business records is automatic.

You’ll be provided with locked containers to dispose of all paper records in then on a regular schedule the company will come to empty and shred all the documents that have been deposited in the containers.

The Bottom Line

In-house shredding may seem convenient, but it will cost you more time, money, and it’s not as secure as a professional service.  To learn more and how we can help you destroy confidential records properly visit our website, www.fileshred.net.