5 ways office shredding puts your business at risk

Old client files, outdated company strategic planning, business research, old competitor analyses, previous employees' records...businesses generate a lot of sensitive information that ultimately has to be safely destroyed.

Although office shredders are up for doing the job, they fall down in a number of areas, particularly when it comes to compliance and security.

If you're still shredding in-house at the office, your business could be at risk. Take a look at the 5 most common reasons why:

1.    Office shredders are not that reliable

The paperwork's backing up, you need to shred it before the recycling van arrives tomorrow morning, and the shredder has gone on the blink. Small office shredders cannot cope with the load of even a medium-sized office, let alone a large company or busy department, like HR. Overworking office shredders is one of the most common reasons for them to malfunction. That, and paper jams. Although this seems easily resolved by investing in a heavy duty shredder, this comes with a hefty upfront price tag as well as ongoing costs for maintenance. Waiting for shredders to be fixed also means sensitive information remains unattended to and a security risk.

2.    Shredders can be a safety hazard

You'd think shredders were relatively safe as far as office machinery go, but apparently fingers getting nicked by shredder blades or caught in them are more common than we realise. It's for this reason that only trained personnel (with the correct security clearances) should operate office shredders. Unfortunately time taken off for safety training, refresher training on new machines, injury and for doing all the shredding, place an extra burden on staff. Office shredders also pose a fire risk, as jammed papers left in the machine while the shredder is still running are in fact a cause of office fires.

3.    Office shredding is often not POPIA compliant

According to Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act, businesses that process citizens' personal information must take all necessary steps to safeguard it. Although personal information typically relates to an identifiable, natural person, in some circumstances it can also be information that identifies a company, close corporation or trust. The term 'process' includes collecting, recording, organising, collating, storing, updating, retrieving, disseminating, distributing and disposing of data. To ensure your business adequately safeguards client, employee or company information, your office shredding protocols need to be watertight. You also need to consistently check that documents are being correctly handled to remain POPIA compliant.

4.    In-house shredding is at greater risk for data leaks

When staff are responsible for physical documents along the entire document lifecycle, from filing to eventual destruction, it's easy for mistakes to creep in. Incorrect filing, misplaced documents and even shredding the wrong documents have all happened at one time or other in organisations doing their own shredding. This also makes these businesses vulnerable to data leaks - a document accidentally disposed of in the recycling bin can easily be retrieved by people outside the company, exposing your business to untold risks.

5.    Office shredding is often not recycled

Once you've shredded your sensitive documents, what do you do with them? The obvious answer is 'put them into the recycling bin', thinking that they'll be 100% recycled and therefore unrecognisable. But there are 2 problems with this: the first is that a lot of waste allocated for recycling in South Africa is not actually recycled, and the second is that our waste is scrutinised by waste pickers looking for items to salvage. If you consider that office shredders do not employ high-tech cross-cutting shredding technology and that documents can still be pieced together afterwards, it's not hard to see the risk associated with this method of document destruction and recycling.