How Confidential Paper Shredding is Key to Business Continuity
February 04, 2021
Paper shredding is common to businesses of all sizes, from the smallest basement entrepreneurs to the largest multinational corporations. They all practice confidential paper shredding for the same reason. To protect the sensitive information that the confidential documents contain.
Except some paper shredding services do only that, shred paper. They do not certifiably destroy the information on the paper. The problem is that not every document destruction service shreds sensitive paper documents into small enough paper particle sizes to make it impossible to reassemble the confidential information.
So even if you have a data security policy in place to ensure the regular shredding of corporate documents, your business may still be exposed to the risks of not certifiably destroying the sensitive information they carry.
Business Continuity Risks of Improper Information Destruction
These are just a few of the business interruption risks your company may be exposed to if it fails to keep its corporate information secure.
- Non-Compliance – Every business is bound by legal and/or contractual compliances to protect sensitive information.
- Data Breaches – The information on paper documents can be an entrée into your confidential digital data
- Identity Theft – Whether it’s personal or corporate, your business may be liable for losses caused to others due to identity theft resulting from your lost data.
- Loss of Business – Whether it’s for any of the reasons listed in the bullet points above, or due to competitors learning of business plans, forecasts, research, customers and more, this may be the biggest business interruption risk of all.
How to Securely Shred Sensitive Documents
The National Association for Information Destruction’s (NAID) AAA certification of secure document destruction is your company’s only guarantee that the information on sensitive documents is irretrievably destroyed.
When you choose a paper-shredding service, ensure that they provide a Certificate of Destruction that guarantees your documents were shredded to NAID-certified specifications.
To learn more about maintaining business continuity, check out our article “Why It’s Time to Change the Corporate Mindset About Data Security”.
