Secure Destruction Protecting business information at the end of its lifecycle.
Secure Destruction: More than just Privacy Act compliance...
The need to destroy information
Since the introduction of The Privacy Act which has affected so many Australian businesses since December 2002, there has been a legal requirement to destroy personal information.
According to the Act, an organisation “...must take reasonable steps to protect the personal information it holds from misuse and loss...” and “...must take reasonable steps to destroy or permanently de-identify personal information if it is no longer needed...”
Looking beyond mere compliance
There is more to consider than the Privacy Act when it comes to destroying information. The White Paper 'Beyond Compliance: How secure destruction helps Australian businesses to protect their competitive advantage, prevent fraud and make them front page news for the right reasons.' has more information. Download the White Paper here.
Apart from the obvious personal information that an organisation may hold like names, addresses, telephone numbers, credit card information or medical records that is definitely covered by the Privacy Act, organisations produce large quantities of commercially sensitive material like quotes, misprinted invoices, drawings, discarded emails and faxes that contain information that could be very damaging to the company and its stakeholders if it fell into the wrong hands. The risks from mishandled information include industrial espionage, 'skip diving' (where someone raids the rubbish bins) employee vandalism and fraud. These risk can be minimised by a secure destruction program.
Document Management Solutions helps businesses comply with the Privacy Act and minimise the risk posed by improper disposal of commercially sensitive information by providing secure destruction services.
Our destruction service helps business in 2 ways:
- Managing the secure disposal of information in offices through our in office destruction service.
- Managing the retention scheduling and secure destruction of archives that we store for our clients through our archive destruction service.
Both our destruction services use industrial shredders to make paper information unrecognisable.