Strips v. confetti: How common office shredders fail business owners in Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay business owners logically seek to cut corners in operations however they can. A common way of keeping expenses down is by purchasing a strip-style paper shredder from the local office retail outlet. These machines have been part of every-day office life for decades.

But do these commercial-grade strip shredders give companies the protection from data breaches that they need? Or does outsourcing data destruction to a professional, confetti-style shredder really make much of a difference?

The downsides of in-house strip shredders

Most companies that buy in-house paper shredders do so because they think they’ll save money and time they’d spend on delivering old papers to an outside company. But by doing so, they place confidential data at risk of exposure — and don’t save nearly as much cash and effort as they think.

Strip-shredders do exactly what their name says they do: cut documents into long, narrow strips. Although they’re cut up, these remains usually keep long bits of fragmented information intact to the point where anyone with some free time can reconstruct them easily. This puts a company at great legal and financial risk. Indeed, many data breaches, fraud crimes, and other illegal acts originate from shredded paper that’s been painstakingly reconstructed.

Lost efficiency is also a factor with in-house strip shredding. Consumer-grade strip shredders usually can’t handle more than one sheet at a time, which means the operator must patiently feed individual single pieces of paper over and over. If a huge stack of papers needs to be shredded, the process can take hours. When the job’s finally finished, they must bundle the remains in bags and transfer them to a disposal bin — usually, one that’s not very secure.

The benefits of confetti shredding

Cross-cut or confetti shredding is safer for the simple reason that the particles are much smaller and harder to reconstruct. While there are a few cross-cut office shredders on the market, they vary in quality. Some may still leave enough data intact for use in fraudulent activities. Although they’re smaller, in-house confetti shreds still may not be broken down enough to meet legal standards for data privacy.

A professional shredding company renders confetti shreds utterly unusable. They’ll dispose of the remains in cost-effective, timely, and environmentally sound ways. This ensures that your business faces no risk from stray data.

Make your Tampa Bay business more secure and protected

ShredQuick’s cross-cut shredding service is far more capable of keeping your Tampa Bay business’s data safe. We use dedicated and thorough routines to render all your discarded information unusable. Call us to find out more about how we can help.