Efficient and Secure Destruction of Paper Documents and Electronic Media

Destruction of paper documents and electronic media is an important part of any records management program. But the constant grind of staying compliant with privacy protection laws can also drain staff productivity. Here we discuss the best, most efficient and secure practices for destroying your paper documents and electronic media.

Paper Records

In theory, in-house destruction of paper documents should be simple, but paper shredding machines do not make the job easy. Office shredders are not the most efficient pieces of equipment; they are slow, temperamental and unreliable. Only a few sheets of paper can be fed through the shredder each time. Paper jams are common. Plus, the shredding receptacle needs to be emptied far too often.

Then you have to remove all the items that go along with paper files. Paper clips, rubber bands, staples, and even sticky notes can wreak havoc on office shredders, so employees must remove these items from files before shredding. This adds yet another tedious, productivity-draining task to the shredding process.

A professional shredding and destruction service offers a solution for eliminating this task and streamlining the whole document disposal process. Secure collection containers are placed in your office. Employees deposit files without having to remove staples, paper clips, etc. And on a scheduled or as-needed basis the containers are collected and all collected material is shredded. Industrial shredders even destroy the non-paper items attached to your files.

Hard Drives, Tapes and Optical Media

Remember the days when you had to use floppy disk to back up your information? Those days are long gone. Now there’s a variety of ways to store electronic data:

• Portable hard drives
• USB flash drives
• DLT and LTO tapes
• CDs and DVDs

But eventually, every storage media reaches the end of its lifespan. Unfortunately, erasing or sanitizing media is not enough to guarantee that its data is gone forever. To guarantee information privacy, these methods must be combined with physical destruction.

A professional media destruction service combines several steps to ensure the data on retired storage media is completely irretrievable. First, the media is degaussed and eradicated, erasing all data from the device. Second, a delamination process is used to separate the data-bearing material from the disc. Finally, the media is grinded into small particles. Together, these processes eliminate the chance of your data becoming compromised.

Keep in mind that not all shredding and destruction providers integrate degaussing, delamination and grinding into their destruction process, so be sure to choose a vendor that incorporates these steps.

Working with a professional shredding and destruction service can streamline information disposal processes for your staff and ensure your business complies with privacy protection laws. It could make a huge difference for your business!

Records Management Center offers shredding and destruction services for businesses throughout Augusta, Evans, Thomson, and Martinez, GA, and Aiken, SC and the Central Savannah River Area. For more information, please contact us by phone or complete the form on this page.

While sitting in a dumpster, inadequately shredded material containing social security numbers, financial data, and other personally identifiable information can easily be reconstruc