Destruction of documents – The Professional Way

Whenever you proceed to shred your documents in the shredding machine, the machines cuts the paper in strips and lays it bare in the bins. The house keeping guy will proceed to dispose the contents of the shreds in the dust bin. Well, there – you heave a sigh of relieve thinking your non-retrievable data has safely gone from this world or is it?

Reconstructing shredded paper records is a very tedious process and requires resources in the form of many man hours. Very resourceful identity thieves have all the time in the world to un-shred the paper records and obtain the data necessary to commit a corporate fraud. It’s super tedious but definitely worth all the time in the world for the thieves to look in to. How many of us really have a level 4 or 6 shredder that can securely and safely, though not a guarantee, it can destroy all the data.

The most common identity theft occurs at the time when you least expect and sometimes at the point when the cause is gross silliness on your or your employee’s part. I am not trying to scare you here but if you delve on the facts – theft occurs only when you least expect it. Here the adage cannot be applied – better late than never. If you do not take precautionary measures to control your data, it might have already been too late.

There are risks you cannot ignore and it’s not of a question of how but if and if you can avoid it – No, but you can certainly prevent it from happening with the help of experts.

Each and every paper document has a life. May be a few months to maybe years, but definitely not forever, once a paper record serves its purpose it must be digitized and destroyed. There are many other disadvantages of storing paper for a long time. Paper records need attention from time to time and one cannot help but dedicate resources for its upkeep.

In today’s day and age, globalisation has diversified businesses and helped raise new businesses as well. The office space and some of its key functions now function as separate entities. First were the office boys, the HR soon followed and now the upkeep of records.

Off-site records storage, secure shredding and destruction of records is one area of businesses has great potential. The reason it’s great is simply because they manage to invest in security and safety in more ways an in-house department can do. Sometimes you might even want to call it overkill. But it’s worth the efforts and investment to avail their services.

That’s about it. You need to give it a good thought before you realise you don’t need it or maybe planning it in your next financial year. The need to do it is now and requires utmost urgency to secure you records in way you would want it. Prevention is always better than cure!