Archives for November 2006
Document Scanning, Fires and Disaster Recovery
Over the summer, there was a well publicised fire that destroyed many valuable and high profile documents. The fire occurred in one of the UK’s largest document warehouses located in the Docklands area of London. Partly due to its location close to the City of London, and because this warehouse was operated by a highly reputable world leading Company, many of the documents belonged to large corporations such as banks, legal and property firms.
Due to the ferocity of the fire, a large quantity of these records was completely destroyed. In many cases there was simply no backup material and so the information they contained was lost forever.
Fortunately, nobody was injured and so the term ‘disaster’ is limited to a commercial one for those companies involved. Nevertheless, it highlighted the lack of ‘disaster recovery’ that was in place from organisations that one might expect to be better prepared. In fact, the full extent of the problem will never really be known as the some of the companies concerned have declined to make it public knowledge that their material has been destroyed.
It has also highlighted the fact that the commercial value of the paper is not covered anywhere. Most document warehouses will only repay the value of the paper itself - a typical ream of 500 sheets being worth a few pounds. This of course in no way reflects the value of the data and unless the document owners have specific insurance to cover such loss of data then the real value is lost. Even then the burden of proof of that value will fall to the Company – a task that is far from easy.
It has taken a couple of months for the fallout from this particular fire to filter through into real actions but in the last few weeks we have seen a large number of high profile organisations who lost records, approach us for help in digitising material either instead of storing it or before doing so.
Ahh……., a classic sales pitch from an ambulance chaser I hear you say! But not so, as I am the first to accept that such mishaps can occur to anyone. This particular event has, indeed, prompted a huge flurry of activity for us but the fire will shortly be forgotten by all except those directly affected. A similar event in Southampton several years ago destroyed a vast number of records held by local solicitors – yet has now all but disappeared from the memory banks.
So I think the message is to seriously reconsider whether records need to be stored physically or whether an easily backed up digital image will suffice. Under rules of Legal Admissibility, most regulatory authorities including HMRC now accept properly constituted digital copies and research has shown that almost 98% of all commercial records can be provided in this form.
The moral I guess is to cover all bases: fires, floods and other natural disasters happen and will continue to do so. All we can do as businesses is try to make sure that they impact us as little as possible and make sure that our information is covered from both a legal and a general business perspective.
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