It does more than just destruct files

Shredders have become an indispensable part of today's office culture

For those of us who think that the shredder sits in the office undertaking only the destruction of old files, it is much more than that.

The main reason the shredder is used in the corporate environment is to stop industrial espionage, which will account for more than $60 billion (about Dh220 billion) in losses for American industry this year.

A large part of this loss stems from the misuse of paper documents, stolen formulas, marketing plans, and customer lists. The loss is growing every year.

The Watergate scandal was just one of many disastrous events that gave us a peek into the mammoth proportions of security espionage damage. It is preciselydue to incidents such as this that shredders came into being.

The government and armed forces have long acknowledged the need for document obliteration. In fact, in the beginning shredders were created principally for military use.

Similarly, it's always a good idea to destroy any document that contain credit card numbers or other sensitive information.

Sometimes just throwing them in bins is not a good idea because the number of cases where people have gone through these bins and hacked into banks by piecing together evidence is on the rise. Today shredders are as common as washing machines in America.

Companies are jumping on the shredder bandwagon by introducing more and more innovative, user-friendly designs to be ahead of the game.

An archetypal purchaser will open a brochure containing several shredders and think they are all designed to meet varied costs and not much else. Not true.

They are designed to meet different applications based on the amount and type of materials that need to be shreded.

There are a plethora of brands and types in the market. The personal shredders are created to work alongside the desks of secretaries, managers and executives who handle confidential information.

Then there are the small office shredders, one step up from the personal shredder created to be used by few people.

The tendency to collect files year after year has made more and more offices sit up and think again of the valuable space lost to store these, sometimes, defunct files. Which is why the general office shredder has become indispensable.

The list is endless - there are departmental shredders making quick work of the destruction of continuous computer forms, followed by the high capacity industrial shredders for centralised shredding requirements of the entire office and all its departments.

There are, in general, two types of shredders - strip cut and cross cut. The strip cut is the one most in use for general office requirements where documents are shredded into several pieces making it difficult to reconstruct.

The cross cut is slightly more expensive but there are added advantages to it, due to the considerable reduction in the volume of shredded waste, a considerable reduction in operator time and far fewer bag changes.

Companies in highly competitive fields, where spying poses a greater risk, often prefer the peace of mind that a high security shredder provides. With a maximum particle size of 1mm x 5mm, the ensuing bits are impossible to reconstruct.

Whatever shredder one chooses, consider the needs more than the price tag, as the losses incurred could be far greater than one could imagine.