SHREDDING
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“Working from home on this scale is still fairly new so business leaders will no doubt still be encountering obstacles they haven’t experienced before in terms of home working security. The important thing is to ensure that employees at every level understand the need for rigid security processes and can use their training to determine when data needs to be destroyed whether they’re working in the office or at home.” For home shredders, Kyle says that a standard baseline would be to ensure your shredding is GDPR compliant. “The lowest level for this is Level 3 or P-4. These shredders are cross-cut or micro-cut shredders which ensure documents can’t be repaired/interpreted. “There are some P-4 level shredders that are suitable for home use. Whether your home workers need this for their office set-up will depend on how much physical data they work with and how often they work from home. If the cost of these shredders is too prohibitive, you may want to implement policies that don’t allow vulnerable data to be taken home or change your remote working policy to reflect the physical data demand of the role.” Kyle adds that while third party off-site shredding is an option, as it is conducted by a professional which means that it comes with a guarantee that data will be destroyed in the correct manner, if a business is dealing with large amounts of paper documents, the cost saving of an office/home shredder could be considerable. “If you ensure that your office shredder is compliant with the level of security required for your business and that your staff are properly trained in how and when to use it, this is most often the more cost-effective approach.”
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beyond the required retention period.” Since the move to remote working during the pandemic, several studies have highlighted the bad habits around data security that have been picked up while working from home, Jeremy adds. “Whether staff are working in the office, at home, in shared working spaces or anywhere else, employers need to manage their security risks. it is important that this is done regularly and in a timely fashion, and sensitive paperwork is not left where it could be accessed by unauthorised individuals in the workplace.” Shredding baseline Kyle Mitchell, commercial sales director at Whitaker Brothers, adds that as confidential shredding has long been a part of modern business, senior business leaders understand the need for robust data destruction processes at this point. “The issue is less prescient with those lower down the chain of a business, which is where some challenges can arise in terms of data security,” he says.
The important thing is to ensure that employees at every level understand the need for rigid security processes and can use their training to determine when data needs to be destroyed. “
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