On-Site vs. In-House Shredding

These days, there is an urgent need to maintain document secrecy. This is necessary to prevent identity thieves from identifying vital information from discarded documents, cancelled checks, old bills and other such discarded data. Identity thieves can use this information to apply for credit cards in the name of your business - and all too often, you will not know about it until the damage has been done.

In business organizations, discarded papers and documents can give away vital business secrets and other sensitive information. They may contain patentable, trademarkable or copyrightable ideas and information, which when leaked, can cause tremendous losses, both monetary and otherwise. Document destruction is extremely important and this is best done through shredding.

Shredding can be done either in-house or via professional services. Onsite shredding is becoming very popular these days and is done by professional document shredding companies. The salient features of in-house or onsite shredding are:

• In-house shredding takes up valuable employee time; more to the point, it is not the core activity of the business. This time, if put to better use, can result in greater productivity and profit.
• When decisions about what to and what not to shred are left to staff, there is a greater risk of employee error and possible confidentiality breaches. There is no official certification that documents with sensitive information have indeed been destroyed.
• Office shredders require maintenance and there is the added burden of recycling the shredded material or simply adding it to the trash.

On the other hand, getting the shredding done onsite with the help of professionals has many advantages.

• It guarantees that trained security personnel have correctly destroyed all material containing confidential information.
• You view the shredding process via CCTV and are presented with an auditable Certificate of Destruction after every shredding operation. This concludes the chain of custody then and there, with no loose ends to tie up later.
• The speed of the operation is unquestionably faster. Shredding usually takes hours to complete in-house. It is completed within a matter of minutes through professional shredding companies.

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Most often, the shredding process is done onsite, in the special trucks belonging to the shredding company. The company provides locked office consoles in which the company employees deposit material considered confidential that needs to be shredded. According to your service schedule, the CSPs (or Customer Security Professionals) of the shredding company empty the consoles into locked tipcarts and wheel them to the shredding truck parked outside the office building. This tipcart is then fastened securely to the chute attached to the truck and is mechanically hoisted inside, where material is automatically once again tipped into the machine.

The documents are then shredded and mixed with other shredded material. The matter and material can never be reconstructed again. The shredded material is then sent for recycling and is eventually used to make many kinds of paper products, contributing to environment preservation. In some cases, at the end of each year, you are awarded with a certificate specifying the number of trees you actually helped to save from being cut during the whole year.

The demand for professional shredding services is rising due to the advantages of onsite shredding; the greater security benefit, recycling speed, zero investment in equipment and space and availability of special shredding machines for shredding different but no less important materials like films, tapes and CDs.