Equipment, personal and financial headaches that often arise from in-house shredding.
With an ever-increasing number of security breaches happening worldwide, we’ve pulled together a bullet pointed list of the challenges and potential issues that can arise from not out-sourcing your confidential waste.
Equipment issues:
Ø Office shredders (strip shredders) – Despite commonly located in offices, these shredders do not provide secure document destruction. Office shredders often shred vertically, as opposed to “cross shred”, making a business’s confidential data easy to reassemble and access.
Ø In some cases, office shredders fail under the demands of an office environment, leaving confidential information intact, and sometimes just being dumped next to the shredder. Due to the open expose this automatically increases the risk of your confidential waste being manipulated with.
Ø Office shredders cannot shred tougher materials such as staples, binders, paperclips, CDs, and more. This will require extra manual labour and time to remove.
Ø Often in-house shredding appliances cannot respond to spikes in demand, which are common place in many businesses during busy periods i.e. end of the financial year
Personnel issues:
Ø Shredding paperwork is a time consuming process, detracting employees away from other, more productive work-related tasks.
Ø Simply shredding your documents doesn’t actually make your business legally compliant i.e. in the event of a suspected breach. A Certificate of Destruction from a reputable shredding provider, like Printwaste, is mandatory to demonstrate proof of destruction.
Financial issues:
Ø According to the Ponemon Institute, in 2015, the cost of a data breach was £104 per compromised record (9% increase), with an overall cost averaging £2.37 million.
Ø Organisations face expensive legal fees, fines of up to £500,000 for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act.
Ø Intangible implications contribute towards financial damage to your business i.e. the company’s reputation, negative media coverage, and loss of customers, etc. To get a grasp of the financial impact, The Ponemon Institute 2015 Cost of a Data Breach study found that an average data breach resulted in £1.07 million of lost business.
Ø The initial cost of a high quality in-house shredder can be expensive, especially if you want to enjoy a hassle-free and low maintenance machine.Using a paper shredding service means that you only have to pay when you need paper shredding and you won’t have any of the overhead costs associated with employing admin staff or buying and maintaining the equipment you require.
For information regarding the Printwaste shredding service, get in touch here.
