Because it had been severely harmed by casually discarded documents, a certain major automobile manufacturer became very vigilant about shredding everything in-house. And, due to its size, this was a major operation. Approximately two tons of documents were shredded every weekday in the basement of the 2 million square foot building. It took fifteen employees to collect and shred all the material.
This went on for years.
Eventually, however, someone realized that it was a bad idea to give the hourly employees who shredding the material direct access to sensitive information from the C-suite, Internal Legal Counsel, Human Relations, and the Labor Relations Department.
Once they did ultimately realize it, however, the company immediately stopped using their own hourly workers and began outsourcing the destruction of those materials to a qualified service provider.
Reading about it now, one might wonder how this fact was missed in the first place. How could anyone, let alone a major automaker, be so careless?
The fact is, however, that this situation exists whenever materials are shredded in-house, and, perhaps more troubling, it also exists whenever employees have access to standard collection containers and consoles that are used in highly sensitive areas.
The standard type of collection containers used to accumulate confidential information are not and were never intended to be high security. They are well-suited and appropriate for segregating the bulk of the sensitive information employees handle in the course of the day, but they are not going to stop a curious employee who wants to see what the boss is up to, who is going to get laid off, or how much other employees are being paid.
Most risk management professionals will tell you that deterring bad outcomes is as much about removing the temptation or opportunity as it is about detection and prosecution. When the C-suite strategic planning documents and HR information such as evaluations, layoffs, compensation are placed is containers accessible to the majority of employees, that is not removing the temptation or opportunity to access them.
The answer to this problem is Shred Vault.
As mentioned, standard sensitive media collection containers are perfectly fine for most of discarded information that employees interact with every day. For the sensitive information discarded from employee-sensitive areas and higher-level sources, however, such containers are not adequate. These areas need something more secure. They need Shred Vault.
By using Shred Vault, in addition to us supplying the standard collection containers in common areas, your firm has the option to place our patented Shred Vaults in the C-Suite, HR, and any other highly sensitive areas where documents and other media are deposited in a locked, high-security container documents after being sealed in tamper resistant bags. At no time after will those documents or media see the light of day. The bag and its contents are securely shredded without ever being opened.
On top of that, Shred Vault reads the barcoded bags which are registered and tied to a specific certificate of destruction.
To learn more, contact us today!
You’ll be surprised how inexpensive real security can be.
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