Information Security is Important!  Document Shredding is Your Best Option!

Information security protects the private and confidential information of individuals, businesses, and organizations of all types from data breaches and identity theft. That includes when it is being disposed of. For paper records that means document shredding. It is important to protect information for ethical and legal reasons.

The ethical reason requires you to protect the private information of your clients, patients, and employees. They have entrusted you with their personal information so you can perform your services or duties. Because they’ve placed their trust in you, you need to respect their privacy and protect their information. Not doing so could result in a loss of confidence from your clients that could ultimately hurt business or, worse yet, result in its closing.

The legal reason is the need to be compliant with federal and state privacy laws that require you to protect private information or face stiff fines and penalties. Those penalties could be enough to put your company out of business.

What is Private & Confidential Information?

Confidential information is personal information about individuals or the proprietary information of a business. It can come in any form, including paper and electronic and on any media such computers, phones, and other portable storage devices.

Here are Some Examples of Personal & Confidential Information:

• Name
• Address
• Phone Number
• Date of Birth
• Social Security Number
• Driver License Number
• Passport Number
• Account Numbers
• Credit Card Number
• Date of Birth
• Mother’s Maiden Name
• Student Information
• Medical Records

Here are some suggestions for protecting personal files and business records:

• Speak to an IT Professional to learn the best practices for securing your technology equipment and data.
• Lock file rooms and file cabinets and limit access.
• Lock desk drawers and offices when not occupied.
• Shut down computers when not in use so that they cannot be casually accessed.
• Protect against roaming eyes by guarding the display of information on monitors so that they cannot be viewed.
• Remove hard drives from old computers and have them destroyed.
• Dispose of paper documents in secure containers until they are destroyed.
• Shred all paper records.

Paper Document Destruction

You have two options when you need a secure way to dispose of paper records. These are one-time and scheduled shredding.

One-time Shredding — When you have an occasional need to destroy documents then you need to ask your vendor about one-time shredding services. It’s the perfect option for a file purge or any intermittent need you may have to securely dispose of paper files.

Scheduled Shredding — When your office is regularly discarding business records in paper form, you can’t just put them in a wastebasket. These papers need to be shredded. Scheduled service is an easy way to do that. Your vendor should be able to supply you with security containers to be kept in your office for the disposal of all your documents. Then the company will come on a regular schedule to empty and shred the contents of each security container.

FileShred provides on-site document shredding and hard drive destruction services to residential and business customers in Connecticut and the Springfield, MA area. For more information, please give us a call or visit www.fileshred.net.