FAQ

Techsteps is a leading UK provider of secure business lifecycle services. We specialize in four core disciplines: IT Lifecycle Services & IT Asset Disposition (ITAD), Document & Information Management, Secure Shredding & Destruction, and Workplace & Data Centre Relocations. Every job is underpinned by an unbroken chain of custody, security-vetted personnel, and full regulatory compliance.

We provide comprehensive nationwide coverage across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. With strategically located regional operations centres and a dedicated fleet of tracked vehicles, we service metropolitan centres, public sector offices, regional facilities, and remote campus locations.

You can submit a request through our online quote form, call our customer operations team directly, or email your project scope to our dispatch desk. We provide formal scoping assessments and transparent fixed quotations within 24 hours of enquiry.

We work with regulated public and private enterprises that cannot afford a gap in the security record: NHS trusts and healthcare providers, central and local government authorities, defence contractors, legal and financial firms, universities, museums, and enterprise corporate IT departments.

We deploy ADISA-certified, NIST 800-88 Rev. 1, and HMG IS5 compliant software sanitisation (Blancco / Certus) for multi-pass cryptographic data overwriting. For non-functional drives or solid-state media that fail verification, we perform high-flux degaussing followed by mechanical cross-cut shearing down to sub-6mm particles. Every drive receives an individual serialized Certificate of Data Destruction.

Yes. Through our cascading asset remarketing program, functional hardware (servers, laptops, workstations, network switches, and SAN storage) is tested, upgraded, sanitized, and resold via vetted secondary enterprise markets. We provide transparent resale revenue-sharing credits that can be paid directly to your organisation or applied against project logistics costs.

We collect all workplace, server room, and data centre hardware: rackmount and blade servers, SAN/NAS disk enclosures, desktop PCs, laptops, mobile phones, tablets, enterprise monitors, networking switches, firewalls, routers, UPS battery banks, cabling, and telecom infrastructure. Both functional and obsolete or damaged equipment are accepted.

Every transit collection is executed exclusively by permanent, BS 7858 security-vetted Techsteps personnel in GPS-tracked, solid-bulkhead vehicles with deadlocks and geo-fenced route monitoring. Barcoded transit cages and tamper-evident container seals are inventoried on-site and signed off before vehicles depart your loading bay, with real-time audit manifests accessible through our client portal.

Equipment with no viable reuse potential is stripped down to base commodity fractions (ferrous/non-ferrous metals, precious circuit board components, plastics, and glass) at certified UK WEEE treatment facilities. We guarantee 0% waste to landfill and provide WEEE waste transfer documentation for your audit trail.

We provide structured retrieval SLAs to match your business urgency: Emergency 2-hour physical dispatch in metropolitan regions, same-day delivery, scheduled next-day courier delivery, or 1-hour Scan-on-Demand where our records team retrieves the physical barcode, scans the file at high resolution with OCR indexing, and uploads it securely to your encrypted portal.

Our dedicated archive vaults are built to BS 4971 (Conservation and Care of Archive Collections) standards. They feature precision climate-controlled ambient temperature and relative humidity monitoring, multi-sensor aspirating smoke detection (VESDA), and clean-agent gaseous fire suppression systems that extinguish fire without water or chemical residue.

Yes. We operate high-speed IBML and Kodak digitisation suites that process millions of pages each month with optical character recognition (OCR), metadata indexing, and automated redacting of sensitive personal information. We also provide Digital Mailroom operations where daily incoming correspondence is opened, scanned, and routed to remote teams within two hours of arrival.

Our records management software tracks statutory retention dates for legal, medical, HR, and tax files. When an archive reaches its retention milestone, automated notifications are triggered to your compliance officers, allowing you to authorise destruction, renew storage, or retrieve items with full regulatory audit logs.

On-site shredding occurs at your facility inside our dedicated high-torque mobile shredding vehicles, allowing your compliance personnel to witness the destruction before the vehicle leaves. Off-site shredding uses secure locked consoles collected in sealed GPS-tracked vehicles and shredded under continuous CCTV surveillance at our BS EN 15713 accredited regional facility.

Immediately upon job completion, you receive a legally defensible Certificate of Destruction detailing the date, collection location, destruction standard (DIN 66399 Level P-4/P-5 for documents, H-5 for hard drives), batch weights, and signatory names. This documentation satisfies UK GDPR, Data Protection Act 2018, and external audit requirements.

100% of destroyed paper is baled and dispatched directly to approved UK paper reprocessing mills, where it is recycled into new paper, packaging, and tissue products. Zero confidential paper goes to landfill, and we supply an Environmental Certificate confirming your landfill diversion and saved tree equivalents.

Yes. We provide specialist product and apparel destruction for staff uniforms, high-security badges, prototypes, decommissioned ID cards, and counterfeit goods. All materials are shredded into unrecognisable fragments with video-recorded destruction options available on request.

Our dedicated IT migration engineering team conducts pre-move cabling audits, port-to-port mapping, and server decommissioning. Hardware is secured inside anti-static, shock-absorbing flight cases and moved in dedicated air-ride suspension, climate-controlled vehicles. At the destination, our engineers re-rack, recable, and verify power-on continuity according to strict critical path scheduling.

Yes. More than 80% of our workplace moves take place over weekends, bank holidays, or evening shifts. We disconnect and pack IT workstations on Friday evening, manage the physical transition over Saturday, and recommission, cable-manage, and test hardware on Sunday so your staff can sit down and work productively on Monday morning.

Yes. We provide specialised white-glove logistics for rare manuscripts, archive collections, and analytical laboratories. For laboratories, we comply with ADR hazardous transit standards, employing temperature-monitored secondary containment and backup generators for cold-chain biological samples and sensitive instrumentation.

Yes. We supply heavy-duty polypropylene lidded hire crates, anti-static bubble wrap, computer transit bags, keyboard/mouse bags, roll cages, stair climbers, and specialist hoisting equipment tailored to your exact building access parameters.

Techsteps operates under comprehensive UKAS-accredited management frameworks: ISO 27001 (Information Security Management), ISO 9001 (Quality Management), ISO 14001 (Environmental Management), ISO 45001 (Occupational Health & Safety), ADISA accreditation for IT asset disposal, BS EN 15713 (Secure Destruction of Confidential Material), and Cyber Essentials Plus.

Yes. Every staff member undergoes rigorous BS 7858 security screening prior to site deployment. This includes 5-year verifiable employment background checks, Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) criminal record checks, credit history validation, and mandatory annual security training.

We supply quantified Environmental Impact Reports detailing Scope 3 carbon emissions avoided through hardware reuse, component refurbishment, and zero-landfill WEEE recycling. These verified environmental metrics can be directly integrated into your corporate SECR, ESG, and sustainability filings.

Standard collections are scheduled within 3 to 5 working days nationwide. For time-critical data centre clearances, urgent compliance audits, or sudden office departures, emergency same-day and 24-hour rapid deployment is available through our dedicated client dispatch desk.