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How to Prepare Your Office For Confidential Shredding
/ Categories: December

How to Prepare Your Office For Confidential Shredding

Allowing your sensitive data to build up to unmanageable levels, or storing them in an insecure manner can put your company at risk of falling foul of the current GDPR. Should this happen, your company could face serious financial penalties potentially resulting in being taken to court for mismanagement of your confidential data. Many businesses often have a huge clear out of outdated computer equipment and redundant paperwork when they move their offices to larger premises. Rather than moving a lot of hardly used paperwork and obsolete computer hardware from one location to another, they will look at employing the services of a professional confidential shredding company, such as Restore Datashred, to help manage the secure destruction of old hard drives, disc storage, magnetic tapes and paperwork that has reached the end of its useful life.

Hiring Professional Shredding Services

Acquiring the services of a shredding company such as Restore Datashred will help to handle this side of your office move is a good move because it will help you to ensure your sensitive materials are properly disposed of in a manner that leaves them in a state that is well beyond any original recognition. Doing this will also mean that you will be meeting your legal requirements in accordance with current GDPR. You may think that by destroying your confidential data you will be creating another problem for yourself, that of what to do with all of your waste product that is left over from your confidential shredding process. By working closely with Restore Datashred, you don't need to worry about this because we take your shredded confidential data and ensure that it gets properly recycled in an environmentally friendly manner that reduces the amount of waste going to landfill.

Preparing your office to tackle your confidential shredding

Let's look at a few tips to ensure your confidential shredding goes smoothly:

Prepare your confidential materials in advance

We all lead busy working lives, so it can be tempting to simply leave sorting out your confidential data waste for shredding until the day arrives when you need it. However, if you are employing an On-site shredding vehicle to visit your business premises to carry out on-site confidential shredding, then you have to remember that they may visit more than one business in a day, depending on how much confidential data you need to dispose of. Give yourself plenty of time to collect together all of the confidential data that needs disposing of and ensure that it is easily accessible for your secure collection operatives, ensuring a secure and compliant service is offered. Preparing well in advance will also allow you to double check your premises, storage rooms, and filing cabinets to make sure you don't miss including any bits and pieces that can easily slip your attention. You may also need to double check with other managers and departments to make sure the documentation you want to destroy is not needed elsewhere. It would be a great loss to the company to shred important documentation in a hurry that still may be needed by other departments at some point in the future.

Thoroughly sort out your materials

You may have sorted out a lot of old paper files and reports that need shredding, but it is important that you separate your paper-based information from physical data such as discs, tapes, and hard drives. This is important because the confidential shredding company you hire may use paper shredding equipment that cannot take hard drives or disks. If you are hiring paper-based shredding services only, then you should check whether the shredding equipment being used can take things such as paper clips, brads and binder clips that may be hidden within your paperwork. You may need to make sure that all these items are removed before shredding to ensure you don't process anything that could risk damaging the shredding machinery.

Do a final check around with your employees

A day or so before your shredding date, do a final check with your employees. Ask them to check through their draws and cabinets to clear out any clutter. They may discover old discs and files that have been overlooked. This is a good thing to do on a regular basis anyway because should any sensitive data be left lying around it could be vulnerable to theft. It makes sense to have proper Security Cabinets installed in your office. These are secure, lockable waste paper collection bins where your staff can post confidential data that they have finished with. This means any data that the paperwork contains will be securely stored away until it can be safely disposed of. The more thorough you are in preparing your office for a shredding day, the more secure your business will be.

Let's take a look at your confidential shredding options with Restore Datashred:

Secure Onsite Shredding Services

No matter whether you are carrying confidential materials in paper-based format or you have computer hard drives or storage discs to dispose of, Restore Datashred has got you covered. Our mobile onsite confidential shredding service can come out to your business premises to process your confidential data. This is a very convenient service for many thousands of business owners who would prefer the added extra security of witnessing the secure destruction of their sensitive data on their own premises with their own eyes. Restore Datashred is the only professional confidential shredding provider with the ServiceMark award from the Institute of Customer Service. This can give you extra reassurance that your sensitive data disposal is in the safest possible hands. We can guarantee that your confidential information is properly destroyed and disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner that does the least possible harm to the environment.

An Added Sense of Security and Convenience

Because you can watch the whole process from start to finish when you hire our onsite shredding services, this can instill you with great confidence that you are fulfilling your data protection obligations in full. After the onsite shredding process has been completed, we will issue you with a certificate of destruction. This means that you will have a fully auditable paper trail for all of your sensitive company information. With Restore Datashred, we can furnish your offices with secure data collection bins that your staff can use to dispose of their confidential data. These lockable bins and security cabinets can keep your sensitive data safely stored away until your next routine onsite shredding date. These bins and cabinets can only be opened by authorised personnel or company managers with responsibilities for your company data protection. You can also be confident that our Secure Collection Operatives that will be processing your waste on the day are each individually vetted to BS7958 and security trained to ensure your confidential data is secure. Once your security cabinets are unlocked, the contents will be taken to the vehicles where the data is emptied onto the blades of the onsite shredder. Our staff never actually view your documentation. This means that the risk of a data breach during the shredding process is kept to an absolute minimum.

Secure Offsite shredding

As a leading UK onsite and offsite shredding company, Restore Datashred operate a cutting-edge service for business owners looking for secure data destruction. While thousands of UK businesses prefer to hire us for the security of our onsite confidential data shredding services, many businesses lack the outside space that enables our mobile shredding services to visit their business premises. We have a perfect solution for businesses with this problem – our secure offsite confidential shredding services. We understand that you want to remain fully compliant with your data protection responsibilities, so this is why we have put a lot of time and effort into perfecting our secure offsite services. We’re BS EN15713:2009 shredding standard accredited, so this means that you can be fully confident that the shredding services from Restore Datashred will be of the very highest standard. Your confidential data is collected directly from your business premises on a pre-arranged date and time, so you will always be expecting us to collect your confidential documents. Our fully-trained Secure Collection Operatives will arrive dressed in full uniform and carry security ID so you can be sure you are dealing with a legitimate company. Each of our collection vehicles are secure and satellite-tracked so you know that nothing can go wrong with your confidential data while being transported to one of our secure disposal and processing depots. Our data destruction depots are fully secure warehouses with strict entry and exit security, so no-one can gain entry to our destruction centres that shouldn't be there. There is no hanging about with our offsite destruction services either! Once your confidential data is inside our secure warehouse, it is shredded the very same day. Once your confidential data has been processed, we take all suitable shredded paper waste and bale it up. These bales are then taken to a paper mill to be completely recycled and reused to make new paper and tissue products. A summary of our offsite shredding processes, in a nutshell: · Confidential material is placed in lockable containers on your site · Our collection vehicle visits your site · The material is taken to our secure destruction site and shredded · A Certificate of Destruction is issued to you · All shredded paper is taken to a paper mill and recycled · New paper is produced which you can buy to close the recycling loop

Your Legal Compliance

As you are legally obliged by law to adhere to current GDPR rules and regulations, you will remain fully compliant with the law by hiring a professional confidential data shredding company such as Restore Datashred. Once we have completed the job of destroying your sensitive data, you will be provided with a Certificate of Destruction. This is an official recorded document that confirms that your confidential documentation has been successfully shredded in a secure manner that fully complies with Data Protection regulations. To ensure that you remain compliant with current laws, you should keep your Certificate of Destruction in a safe place just in case your company is audited. This certificate ensures that your company complied with the outlined data protection laws at the time of document destruction and gives the auditors a final secure end to their paper trail. There are still many cases of identity theft and business fraud that are reported each year. Making sure that you securely destroy and dispose of your old company data once it becomes useless to you can help to keep your company protected with vital proof that no data breaches occurred during your confidential waste disposal procedures.

Conclusion

Working closely with a professional and experienced onsite and offsite confidential shredding service, such as Restore Datashred, is your most important advantage when it comes to safeguarding your clients' and employees' confidential information and keeping your company fully compliant with all current Data Protection laws. If you need to discuss your confidential data disposal needs, do not hesitate to contact our friendly Restore Datashred staff. We are here to help!

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