A bit about compliance.

Regulatory compliance is not optional for your business but it might not be the burden that you think it is. 

"Take advice, know your obligations and make provision. Why take a risk."

Managing your business documents digitally will not automatically make you compliant with the increasing burden of regulatory rules and document retention requirements but it will make it easier.

The cost of compliance both in terms of effort and the risk of failure should you be fined can be greatly reduced by the better management of your documents and making them digital is without doubt the best way forward.

Whatever your business obligations are digitising your important business documents will allow you to:

1. -          Increase your information security
2. -          Reduce costs associated with document storage and document retrieval.
3. -          Enable you to quickly and easily present documents on demand.
4. -          Develop and execute document retention policies.
5. -          Easily audit your records.

“Technology cannot make you compliant but the right technology will help you”

Make sure you have the right scanning and document management technology to take care of your business documents but the lesson here is that no amount of technology will make you compliant – the only way you can be compliant is to have the correct policies, procedures and most importantly the people who understand them.

Disaster recovery – have you got everything covered?

Guess what, paper has no inherent provision for disaster recovery! Whilst many organisations have spent considerable time and effort planning for the worst the “elephant in the room” appears to be paper records and paper based processes.

So, whilst in many cases organisations might claim that they can have key personnel functioning in an offsite replica of their business with virtualised applications and recovered electronic content very few have made any contingency for paper.

The cold hard fact is that if a paper record is destroyed by fire, flood or any other natural disaster that it is the end of that record, there exists no recovery point.

One common miss-conception is that by storing important paper records in an off-site paper warehouse is in some way a disaster recovery policy for paper. This is totally erroneous as whilst many of these vast paper warehouses have very careful climate controlled areas with state of the art fire deterrents they are not unassailable. You may recall an incident in London some years back when fire damage destroyed millions of records at a well known paper storage business.

I’m sure that citing a fire or flood is not a legally acceptable reason for being unable to disclose a record, and in our litigious society that can amount to significant loss.

The truth is that if you have important content on paper that’s not backed up or managed in some sort of EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) you cannot really have a complete disaster recovery plan in place.

Content is content whether it’s paper or electronic, if it’s important you need to make provisions for it just in case the worst should happen.

Physical Protection:

2 out of 5 companies who experience disaster are out of business within 5yrs if they even if they have a plan(Gartner)

Business suffering incapacitating disaster with no DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan):

Ø  only 43% resume operations

Ø  of 43%, 29% still in business in 2 years

Ø  total of 71% out of business in 2 years

(Contingency Planning Research)

Minimise the risk of paper and convert to electronic content where replication can be managed.