In many offices there is a continuous passage of important documents and letters that contain personal information of the clients. These papers, such as expenses receipts, personal files and account files,contain many confidential and sensitive data. They concern real persons and they can be personal, or professional, or public information; but they also concern legal persons like companies, organisations, corporations, or public bodies.
All these documents can’t be simply thrown in the dustbinwhen they are no longer needed. In fact, to prevent this information from falling into the wrong hands and to prevent identity and data theft, it’s fundamental to get rid of them using a professional paper shredder.
These professional machines guarantee the destruction of these documents. If, on the other hand, these cards are thrown in the bin or they are left for recycling, there is a risk of putting the customers in danger and this can lead to damage the company’s reputation.
Respect the law to protect your office and the environment
Indeed, there are laws that can punish the improper disposal of documents that contain personal data and sensitive information. This means that businesses must destroy correctly not only the no longer needed documents of their clients, but also the files about employees no longer working for them.
For example, the GDPR – an acronym that refers to the General Data Protecting Regulation – has stated important rules about the procedures to follow to destroy documents in order to protect data.
The first rule requires companies to destroy documents safely and in a timely manner, without leaving any trace of the data they contain and thus eliminating the risk that such data may be used fraudulently.
The GDPR requires also companies to behave in support of nature and the environment; this means that all the documents must be destroyed in such a way that they can still be recycled. For this reason, it is recommended the use of professional shredders, since the stripes of papers can still be put in the recycling bin.
How to choose the correct shredder
It’s important to choose the paper shredder according to the needs of each office and according to the volume of documents the office must destroy. In any case, the first thing to evaluate in a shredder is the security level. This level goes form a minimum of 2 to a maximum of 7 and it depend on the dimensions of the paper stripes produced by the shredder. Each level is suitable for different types of documents: for example, the level 4 is indicated for confidential documents, since a machine with this level can shred an A4 paper in 321 striped of 4 x 38 mm each.
Another characteristic to evaluate in a professional shredder are the sheet capacity – that means the number of sheets that can be destroyed at the same time –, the shredding output – the number of sheets destroyed per hour –, the waste bulk reduction, and the materials that the machine can shred, such as papers, cd, credit cards, DVD and even floppy disc.
