Why an external contractor?
The hoops you have to jump through to remains ISO accreddited if you do your own shredding are ridiculous. It is not our primary business focus or a revenue stream so it is actually cheaper to use an external company.
To the person who said "Why not just rip it up", you have no idea about the business world it seems, and how accreditation and certification around data security work.
But what about your scanners with internal hard drives that store every document scanned,do you have them encrypted?
We have a system that scans to hard drive fully encrypted every step of the way. These are purged once the file has reached our secure storage area. So, yes!