8 tips to reduce your hard drive shred costs

Recently, we laid out the five factors that we use to calculate the per drive shred cost:

1. Onsite vs offsite services
2. Quantity
3. Equipment
4. People
5. Organization

A little worried? Don’t be. If you look at the factors one by one, what is the percentage you can shave to additively save without increasing risk or reducing compliance.

Reduce hard drive shred cost

Here are some tips that will absolutely reduce your overall hard drive shredding costs

1. Larger quantities.  Bigger quantities take advantage of the economy of scale. In other words, it takes just as much to send a truck out to a single location for 5 drives or 500. Or 5000.
2. Defined tier pricing.  Understand where the volume breaks are so that you can plan how to reduce costs.
3. Flexible timing.  If you have wiggle room on dates and pickup timings that allows our dispatch team to slot you in at the optimal scheduling opportunity. You can save money by reducing trip fees.
4. Standardized prices for standardized national accounts. The beauty of a national onsite data destruction program is that our availability and nationwide mobile hub locations ensure a consistent process for every job. As an example, we build all types of protocols and procedures specific to the corporate standard and then roll it out to every location for every shred job. Your standardization helps us streamline the shred process because your jobs are clearly defined and the repeatable.
5. Data destruction flexibility. Data destruction is a broad term for many different physical “shred-style” processes: mutilation, pinning, crushing, shredding, or pulverization. Depending on the device, your industry, your contract, your regulation, you may be able to save money by modifying the data destruction process.
6. Evaluate the required shred size. This is a simple time calculation: it takes longer to shred a drive down to 2 mm (dust) than 20 mm (small pieces.)  If you have latitude, you can help reduce costs immediately. Ask us for shred samples to compare final shred sizes.
7. Consider erasure or degaussing. Degaussing is much quicker and cheaper per drive. Erasure doesn’t add the expense of transportation to the recycler. Instead you have the flexibility to securely reuse or resell the drives
8. Create a shred calendar. We have clients with once-a-week pickups. Some are once a month. Others are in bursts around the country.  If you have size and enterprise on your side, we can help with a program even if it’s a different location around the country every week. Or month.

The bottom line on hard drive shred costs

So how much?

If your bottom line is cost and you just want some guy to make stuff disappear, well, there’s not much we can do for you.

At Guardian, our shred processes and pricing are standardized, our project approaches are flexible but we follow NAID AAA standards, use NIST equipment, adhere to regulatory compliance and value our employees and our partner relationships. In other words, we work with every customer to get the best pricing but we don’t cut corners.  We value your reputation and our own.

Talk to us and we will work with you to help you build an asset disposition data destruction program with shred pricing that meets your needs, industry standards and compliance.

To drive your hard drive shredding cost down, read this. Or contact us to walk through options that fulfill your end of life equipment and data destruction process without sacrificing quality or increasing risk.