Companies might call this a number of things: Confidential Data, Sensitive Data, Personal Identifiable data – but it is really all the same thing. We are talking about information that needs to be protected to preserve confidentiality, prevent fraud and potentially identity theft.

For businesses confidential data can be broken down into 3 different sectors:

Employee Data, Customer Data and Business data.

Below we have provided some examples of data that is classified as Confidential Data and therefore you need to ensure you are disposing of this correctly – Whether it is electronic or paper data.

• Customer Credit Card Details – Everyone knows about this right, its probably the one piece of data that people are already very careful with? But what about taking payments over the phone from the customer – Do your staff take a quick note of the credit card number on a notepad to ensure they captured it correctly? What then happens with the paper / notepad that they wrote on?
• Home Addresses / PPS Number / Email Addresses  – When we hire new staff, or our employees change roles this usually generates a nice big paper trail – You have contracts, onboarding documentation, new employee data forms. So, what happens with the data once you have captured this, does it sit in a filing cabinet? How long does it stay there before you do a “Clean out” – Do you still have data in your offices for employees that have left the company? Data that you have on file for your employees can be the most sensitive in terms of what could go wrong if it got into the wrong hands.
• Invoices & Quotes – Invoices & quotations can include lots of sensitive data, names, addresses, bank details to name but a few…. This data can belong to your customer, your suppliers, and your own business.
• Financial Data – Bank Statements, credit card statement’s, even internal finance reports – These are all likely to contain data that you would not want getting out into the world.
• Emails, Notes, Memos – This is the type of confidential data that people are probably the least aware of, and probably the least careful with! What is your company policy when it comes to memos, notes, printing out emails? Have you give your staff clear instructions on how to handle this?

Ensuring your staff are able to define what is considered confidential waste is the first step – Then you need to ensure your staff know how to correctly dispose.

If you would like to talk through your requirements for Data Destruction contact our expert team today: [email protected]