Businesses grow, thrive, and die by the safety of their information. This may sound overly dramatic, but it’s hard to overstate exactly how critical good document security is to the lifespan of your business, no matter how large or small it is. In 2020, the average cost of a data breach was $3,860,000. 28% of those data breaches involved small businesses, and 30% of those involved the assistance of someone already within the company.
From statistics like these, we can discern a clear message: for your business or your office to thrive well into the future, you’re going to require robust document security. The field of document management is expansive, and we’re not going to try and cram everything you need to know about it into today’s discussion.
Instead, we’re going to hone in on some of the most effective tips you can use to instantly improve your office security and, with the aid of strategic paper shredding, provide an optimistic outlook for your company’s future.
1. Assign Group Permission Instead of Individual
Let’s say you have an office with twenty different employees. Is it easier to track access for a certain document if you assign individual permissions, or simply make a single group of those employees with clearance? Especially if you’re dealing with digital files, the solution that will give you the least headaches in the long-term is almost always to assign group permissions instead of individually assigning each individual employee different file access.
2. Keep Secure Digital Backups
If you’re unlucky enough to suffer from a data breach, all of your records – everything from customers to payment info – could disappear in a heartbeat. Even losing the last few days of information is enough to set many businesses back several thousand dollars. Save yourself the heartache and regularly make secure backups of your digital data. Keep them in a separate, confidential location, and update them on a scheduled basis.
3. Similar Security Gets Stored Together
Instead of trying to tailor different security levels to different rooms and files, make things easy for yourself and your document management team. Store items with similar levels of security together to make it easier to protect and secure.
This goes for both physical and digital items. If you have physical documents with a high level of security, keep them in a location that is strictly off-limits to anyone without the proper clearance or credentials. If you have digital files that require robust encryption, don’t dump them on the office drive with only a password to protect them. Not only will you automatically know where future documents should be stored for their safety, but you’ll also be able to provide access to employees based on the different security levels, making your job easier without compromising the safety of the information in your care.
4. Don’t Keep Unnecessary Files
There is almost no better way to ensure that your employees and business processes will be slowed down to detrimental effect than to meticulously hold onto every file that enters your building. It’s true that personally identifiable information (PII) requires specialized disposal, but clogging up your document management system because you’re not sure how to discard them causes almost as many issues as improper disposal.
If you find yourself buried under a backlog of documents, either digital or physical, a professional purge shredding service can remove them in a single day. A purge shredding service must shred documents according to the latest state and federal privacy regulations, which means you can be confident that the information processed will be permanently and securely destroyed.
If you have digital files, a purge shredding service can help there, too. Hard drive shredding allows you to physically destroy old e-media like hard drives, CDs, and SD drives, which guarantees that the data can never be recovered, even by the most accomplished technician. By securely destroying these old files, you’ll ensure that you have plenty of room for new ones, and you’ll be able to streamline the process by which your employees collect documents for day-to-day work.
Management Made Easy With Paper Shredding
Whether it’s a one-time purge shredding service or a regularly scheduled paper shredding appointment, Gator Mobile Shredding provides confidential, compliant, and convenient document destruction services to thousands of businesses across West Virginia and Ohio. At the end of every shredding appointment, you’ll receive a Certificate of Destruction, which functions as proof that your documents were destroyed by a professional paper shredding provider. Locally owned and operated, our shredding services are both HIPAA and FACTA compliant, and we take pride in producing a smaller shred particle size than our competitors for the improved security of your documents.
If you’d like more information on purge shredding service from Gator Mobile Shredding, give us a call at (304) 488-8627. You can also send us a message online.