Given the current situation with COVID-19, many people are being asked to work from their homes. This is to help limit the exposure and spread of the virus amongst our communities. Since work is being relocated to home in many cases, we need to remember that we are now going to be producing secure business records at home. This means that our information security requirements have also been relocated.

pile of documents with a man sitting behind them

Keeping Secure At Home

Naturally, we are going to have to take similar steps to keep compliant with privacy laws. Information theft is surely still going to be happening during this time, so vigilance is still required. Cyber attacks seem the most logical source for information theft with so much more data being exchanged back and forth, and we’ll touch on that another time, but what about our paper records? Some things will still need to be printed off, so we will focus on that for now.

Paper Records At Home

The first thing we’d recommend you do is set up a proper storage location for these papers. The recommended system would be something like a safe, one that can’t be carried off, that is kept locked and out of site. If you are lacking a safe, and since in this situation you should be at home the whole time, you could potentially compromise. Utilize something that can lock, a good desk drawer, file cabinet, or some kind of container.

Leave whatever you chose to use locked at all times, the exceptions being when you are taking files in and out. If you are looking at a record, and you’re not sure if it should be stored securely or not, be on the side of caution and store it anyways. When it comes to information safety, it is best to be overly careful to avoid any issues that could happen. Retain records only for as long as is absolutely necessary, any longer is venturing into the territory of risk. When it’s time to dispose of them, secure shredding is what you need.

Shredding At Home In Isolation

Now comes the big question: how do you shred securely when we are trying to limit contact with other people? First thing is first, getting shredding at home. Through the magic of a fleet of shredding trucks, shredding service is extremely mobile. Arranging to have a shred truck swing by your location is a simple process, and remains the same for any on-site operation.

Now how about the isolation part, clearly if staff members are making house calls they are coming into contact with others, and the point of isolation is to avoid this. To that end we do have a way, that is very simple. Gather your documents together and place them somewhere that is easily accessible, right by your front door inside the house, for example. This allows our staff member to grab it without coming into direct contact with you.

Should you be highly vigilant, and don’t want anyone from the outside to enter your house, something you can do is leave them right outside the door. If you take that approach, don’t leave things sitting out there, when the truck arrives you can put your items out in this way, but if you do it too early you are leaving it at risk. In order to keep your peace of mind for shredding, you can of course come out and watch the process, but please stay back to the recommended distances between people while the virus is a concern.

It’s in this way that we can still help to keep your information compliance on point, even while self isolating. Please reach out to us to set up a good system.