Storage Units: What to Know Before Storing Your Belongings

As your business finds new ways to preserve old information, you may find that you rely less and less on paper documents. If you are in the process of "going paperless," you also want to make sure that your clients' or customers' personal information is secure and protected. To do that, you have to upgrade company security on your computer systems and shred every paper document thoroughly. Here are a few options for document shredding that can really help your business in its endeavors to go paperless and protect customers/clients.

Document Shredding Service

A document shredding service picks up your boxes of paper documents on a regular basis and shreds and destroys them for you. There are also document shredding services that accept shipments of paper documents that you need shredded. Either way, you can have your paper documents destroyed, but this service is not cheap. If you are a small business owner or sole proprietor, this may not be the best option unless you have accumulated so many paper documents you cannot hope to effectively, quickly and efficiently destroy them all. 

Super Mega-Shredding Machines

Another option for destroying documents is a super mega-shredding machine. These machines take up less room than a commercial copy machine but can shred several pages all at the same time. You can even shred CDs, DVDs, and plastic cards while shredding paper documents. If you have stacks of documents that are stapled or paper-clipped together you do not have to waste time pulling them apart and removing the metal staples or paper clips because the mega-shredder annihilates these too. Examples of this type of mega-shredder are the Destroyit 4002 shredders, which can be purchased through many business and office supply companies.

Cross-Shredding Standard Machines

If you cannot afford a super mega-shredding machine, then your last best bet is a standard-sized cross-shredder. These machines are about the size of your usual 13-gallon office trash can, and while they cannot destroy quite as many papers at once as mega-shredders, they can still consume several pages at the same time and "eat" staples. Additionally, these shredders can cross-shred, meaning that as one shredding blade slices the paper documents vertically, another slices the the already vertically-sliced papers horizontally, turning your documents into confetti. The documents are also destroyed in one of the most secure places possible--your office. Ergo, you decide how and where to dispose of the shredded documents.