Secure Records Management

The amount of data organizations generate and store grows exponentially each year. Managing the growth and variety of content and its locations is a complex process. Add to that the growing industry and government regulations for information retention policies, and it’s necessary for your organization to adopt a records management policy to minimize the risks associated with large amounts of data stored across your enterprise.

On top of the complexity of managing your organization’s critical data and ensuring you can adapt to evolving regulatory requirements, let’s consider the costs associated with keeping volumes and volumes of unneeded information. It’s more than just having a repository to store your enterprise content – you need to be able to locate, present and analyze your enterprise-wide information. Storing massive amounts of information is worthless if you cannot access it quickly and accurately report on it

As mentioned,

It can be extremely costly.

Keeping track of records is very difficult.

Retrieving records from storage from time to time and destroying them is quite a tedious and time consuming exercise leading to its neglect.

Old Records are stored for a much longer period than required

They occupy precious space at high cost and do not vacate space for ever increasing new records.

Compound the records handling problems due to sheer multiplicity of records year after year

The Professional Records and Information Services Management (PRISM) International Inc. state that organizations have the following issues with internal records management:

Managers spend an average of 4 weeks a year searching for or waiting on misfiled, mislabeled, untracked or “lost” information.

The average cost of recreating one page document is $180 (£110)

Companies typically misfile 2-7% of their paper and electronic records

67% of data loss is directly related to user error, making them 30 times more of a menace than viruses and the leading cause of data loss.

Office workers can waste up to TWO hours per day looking for misplaced paper work.

Systematic management of records allows organizations to:

know what records they have, and locate them easily

increase efficiency and effectiveness

make savings in administration costs, both in staff time and storage

support decision making

be accountable

achieve business objectives and targets

provide continuity in the event of a disaster

meet legislative and regulatory requirements, particularly as laid down by the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act and the Data Protection Act

protect the interests of employees, clients and stakeholders

Records management offers tangible benefits to organizations, from economic good practice in reducing storage costs of documents, to enabling legislative requirements to be met. An unmanaged record system makes the performance of duties more difficult, costs organizations time, money and resources, and makes them vulnerable to security breaches, prosecution and embarrassment. In an unmanaged records environment, up to 10% of staff time is spent looking for information.