How a Business Can Keep Confidential Waste Confidential

1. How a Business Can Keep Confidential Waste Confidential

2. Confidential waste is a term that is likely foreign to most people, yet it is of the utmost importance to many businesses. In fact, there’s a very good chance that you and almost everyone you know has a much closer tie to confidential waster than you know.

3. What Is It? Confidential waste refers to any sensitive information that a business has in its possession. This information might be as part of paper files, digital files, CDs or any other form that stores data. A business may have confidential waste on its new, high tech computer system or in stacks of old paper files collecting dust in a storeroom. Wherever it is, it’s extremely important that it’s kept confidential and protected.

4. What to Protect It’s natural to think of personal information about clients and customers as the type of confidential waste that needs protecting, but there’s a lot more to it than that. That’s not to say that the personal data or financial information about customers isn’t important because it certainly is. It just means that there’s a lot more to the confidential waste picture. At the executive level of the business, you may have legal contracts, strategic forecasts or important correspondence that needs protecting. If your business has an R & D department, information regarding new products, specifications or formulas, recipes and plans may be vulnerable.

5. What to Protect Sensitive information about your employees is likely part of the human resources filing system. This may include performance reviews, payroll information, medical records and discipline reports or treatment programs certain employees have used. In accounting, there are budget schedules, payroll statements, information on suppliers and customers and different internal reports. The sales and marketing department has contracts, advertising strategies, training information and sales goals. More training information can usually be found among the information that deals with operations, not to mentions sensitive manuals and company processes. Virtually every area of a business is bound to contain sensitive information and confidential waste that needs to be protected for the business to continue operating at an optimum level.

6. How to Keep It Confidential Considering the level of importance that goes along with keeping confidential waste confidential, enlisting the help of an outside business is the most efficient and effective way to go about it. A reputable document shredding company specializes in destroying sensitive documents in all forms, using the most secure methods possible. The key is to never allow anyone the opportunity to get their hands or eyes on the information until it is destroyed. Top document shredding companies will come into your business and place all of the files that are slated for destruction into a locked box or console. This way, no one who has access to the building is able to get to the files that you want kept private.

7. How to Keep It Confidential When the time arrives for shredding, a rep from the shredding company will unlock the box and take your files to an on-site shredder. This often takes place inside a truck that’s parked outside your business. The shredding is confidential and done in such a way that it will never be possible to reconstruct the files. You can also choose to have the confidential waste removed from the business and destroyed elsewhere, but many business managers and executives feel more at ease when they know the information never left the premises in its original form.   Once the job is complete, you should receive a certificate or other written documentation stating what was destroyed. You’ll receive the same kind of written certificate if you had digital files or a hard drive destroyed instead of paper.

8. Why Keep It Confidential? The ‘how’ of keeping confidential waste confidential is valuable information for any business, but many people also want to know the ‘whys’. Identity theft is one ‘why’ that many people are familiar with, but once again, there’s more to it than that. Identity theft is a serious problem that typically consists of someone either stealing information in order to clean out your savings or borrow your identity to take out loans and credit. If you’re really unlucky, an identity thief may go out and commit crimes using your identity. Once the personal information is gathered, it doesn’t take much for a skilled identity thief to put together acceptable pieces of identification with his picture and your data. Complying with privacy laws is another important reason that a business wants to keep confidential waste confidential. More and more regions and jurisdictions are passing legislation that deals with the document destruction end of privacy. Not complying can result in strong penalties, which will end up causing damage to most businesses. One of the benefits of signing up with a good shredding service is that they will worry about the laws, so you can focus on running the business.

9. Why Keep It Confidential? The security of your business is another big ‘why’ when it comes to keeping the confidential waste confidential. Just sit back for a moment and imagine if all of the private business information that exists about your company was to get into the hands of a competitor or someone trying to cause harm to the business. Every business has proprietary information of some kind, not to mention all the financial information, contracts, reports and other data. In a sense, the very existence and future of your business could depend on how you choose to deal with the confidential waste issue. It may seem a bit dramatic to put it that way, but if one of your clients has his or her identity stolen or some top-secret company information gets out, you could be looking at serious trouble. If prospective clients and even current clients feel that their information isn’t safe, they will form a long line of people that take their business elsewhere. Of all the areas you may want to cut corners in your business operations, the destruction of your confidential waste can’t be one of them. Take the time to look for a good company, set up a schedule and then let them do their job, so you can do yours.