The world is making a huge effort to go paperless, and it has now come to the stage where media shredding is as important as paper shredding. The efforts of the business world to go paperless should be applauded, especially given the environmental benefits of reducing paper waste. With the increased reliance on media storage of data, though, comes the increased importance of media shredding and tape shredding services.
An Uncomfortable Thought
Imagine what would happen if all the private data held by other companies was made public.
Everyone would know your medical history, your financial standing, every store you’ve shopped at and every online purchase you’ve made, the websites you’ve visited, and even everything you’ve ever said in a private counseling session.
The results could be disastrous! People would lose their jobs, their marriages, and in some extreme cases, potentially their freedom.
There is a reason that companies have a legal and ethical obligation to protect the information that they collect from their customers and clients, and in a nutshell, it’s because there is an implied understanding that information provided or otherwise collected will be protected.
All companies have an obligation to ensure that secure document destruction is a part of their ongoing data management efforts.
The Role of Media Shredding
By now, most companies understand that confidential paperwork cannot simply be thrown away or recycled: that it must be shredded by a licensed and NAID certified data destruction company in order for the information it contains to be rendered completely inaccessible.
The same stands true for digital data held on hard drives, DVDs, CDs, memory sticks, and the like. For obsolete or unwanted magnetic tape media, including backup tapes, VHS tapes, CDs, floppy disks (remember those?), and other plastics, media tape shredding is necessary in order to completely dispose of the media.
Backup Tape Destruction Services
Many companies have countless backup tapes and, while it is always prudent to create backup tapes regularly in case of data loss resulting from a network or system failure, it becomes unnecessary to store every backup tape ever created.
However, backup tapes cannot simply be discarded or recycled, as this would be a clear breach of a company’s legal and ethical duty to maintain the integrity of its clients’ confidential data. A backup tape destruction service is a simple and effective way of eliminating the problem, providing data tape shredding that will render the information completely inaccessible.
When tape shredding via a tape shredding machine has been utilized, there is no possibility of an obsolete or unwanted media tape falling into the wrong hands. As the name suggests, media shredding completely pulverizes the tape or other media, leaving little more than a small pile of metal and plastic shards remaining.
Image by ukhomeoffice (Flickr: Shredded bits of the database) CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Data tape shredding from a licensed and NAID certified data destruction company makes it completely impossible for any data to be harvested from the unwanted media, completely satisfying a company’s ethical and legal obligations.
To find out more about media shredding, contact us at Data Destruction Corporation today. We make use of industry standard tape shredding machines to take care of all your media shredding requirements.