To shred offsite or onsite, that is your question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer and know not whether your documents were indeed shredded, or to rest knowing they have been torn asunder.
Okay, enough Shakespeare. You want to know what is better, to have your confidential information destroyed by a mobile shredding service or offsite shredding service. While both types of vendors offer the protection businesses need from identity thieves, competitors and malicious actors (no pun intended), both are not necessarily equal.
How are these different? Let us count the ways:
Onsite Shredding
Mobile document destruction or onsite document destruction is where the shredding company brings a shredding truck to your location, then collects and shreds your documents immediately before leaving your location.
Three features of onsite shredding service:
Immediate Destruction.With on-site destruction, you can be sure that within minutes of your bin being emptied, your documents are nothing but small, tattered fragments of paper.
Visible, Real-time Destruction.If you want, you can watch as your documents are carted out to the mobile shred unit, lifted into the chute, dumped into the hopper and diced to bits.
Single Step Handling. With mobile, on-site shredding, the documents are taken immediately from your shredding cabinet or bin and shredded, before the shredding truck ever leaves your location. The process is simple, reducing the chance for mistakes.
Offsite Shredding
In plant-based or off-site shredding, the shredding service vendor arrives at your location, picks up your documents, empties your shred cabinets into shred bins, retrieves your filled shred bins or collects banker boxes of documents to shred and hauls them to a location where the documents are then shredded.
Three features of offsite shredding service:
Imminent Destruction, maybe — but not immediate. With offsite or plant-based destruction, when you put a document in the bin to be destroyed, its destruction maybe imminent, but not immediate. From the point your documents are collected by your service, they may be held for hours or days before being put in the hopper.
Visible — but by DVR, so to speak. Plant-based operations, if they are NAID-certified — will have video surveillance of your documents being shredded on file, but you have to go through the hassle of requesting, retrieving and viewing it, long after the job has been done.
Many Steps, Many Handlers. With an off-site operation, the documents leave your location whole and legible, transported to the destruction site (if not a storage location beforehand) where they may sit, whole and legible, for however long until the company decides to shred the material.
Obviously, our bias is toward mobile shredding because that is what we do. And we do mobile shredding because we think it is the best and most secure document destruction solution.
About R.K. Black, Inc.
R.K. Black, Inc. is an Oklahoma City-based, family-owned leading provider of office technology solutions to small and medium-sized businesses in Oklahoma and Kansas. We specialize in everything business technology from copier, fax, printer and scanner technology to document management, onsite paper shredding services, VoIP phone systems and managed IT support to video surveillance solutions.
If you want to learn more about us, feel free to explore the website, read our other blogs or click the button below to be contacted by one of our reps and tell you! Also, be sure to keep watching our social media channels on Facebook and Twitter for more business tips from our blog.
