If your business files are overflowing with papers containing personal, sensitive, confidential information that you are required by law to shred but haven’t gotten around to taking care of, you’re probably eager to eliminate your paper jungle.
You may be tempted to jump at the first “We Shred Documents” sign you see and load your car with boxes or garbage bags of files to drop them off as soon as possible.
From a security standpoint, that may not be a good move.
Here’s why: Some companies say they shred documents when, in fact, they collect documents and, at a later time, arrange for them to be shredded.
That may not be a problem at all. But when you’re giving sensitive documents to someone else to destruct, you need to make certain they are handled properly.
Let’s say a nearby business offers a variety of services – mailing, shipping, faxing and so on. You know the business owner and have used their services for many years. One day you see a sign in the window indicating that they now shred documents. You say to yourself, “Great! How convenient!” Based on your longstanding relationship with the business owner, you know that you can trust him and his employees to properly, securely handle your documents. To play it safe, though, you ask how they shred documents. The business owner shows you the locked, tamper-proof cabinet where customers’ documents are inserted. The next step, he explains, is that on our scheduled pick up day, a AAA NAID Certified shredding company’s bonded and insured driver arrives to transport the cabinet to their facility where the contents will be shredded using professional equipment. And once the papers have been shredded, they are baled and taken by truck to the paper mill for recycling.
If this is the information you are given, from a person you know and trust, by all means, gather up your boxes or garbage bags of files and drop them off as soon as possible. You can rest assured that your documents are going to be handled properly.
But if the information you’re given doesn’t give you the confidence that your documents will be either shredded on the spot or properly, securely handled until the time they are shredded by a professional company using professional equipment, don’t leave them.
A professional shredding company proudly promotes that they are AAA Certified by the National Association of Information Destruction. They give tours of their operations and show off their mobile shredding trucks. They provide customers with a choice of locked, tamper-proof cabinets to collect documents.
At Paper Tiger, a AAA Certified NAID member, we go to great lengths to show you the importance of what we do behind the scenes. To learn more, watch this animated presentation showing our 7-steps process and read more of our blog posts.
Since 1997, Paper Tiger Document Solutions has handled residential and commercial shredding throughout the Chicago area and northeastern Wisconsin. Whether we provide shredding services at a client’s location in one of our mobile trucks, or we pick up documents and shred them at our facility, we provide a Certificate of Document Destruction.
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