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You business data includes your paper documents and electronic files, both of which you have a responsibility for protecting.  In addition to safeguarding records essential to the long term viability of your business, you also have ethical and legal obligations to protect the privacy of your clients’ information.   However, without the right processes in place, your due diligence can easily fall by the wayside.

Consider this statistic from the University of Texas:  94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss ...

If you happen to be a healthcare provider or own a medical practice, then you’re no stranger to the ethical importance of maintaining confidentiality between you and your patients. However, beyond maintaining high moral principles you also have a strict obligation to meet the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. As your practice strives to reap the incentives for adopting electronic health record (EHR) ...

There’s no question that offsite storage can be a cost-effective and secure solution for your business records needs. Not only can you reduce the amount of office space needed for retaining documents and files, but you can also achieve:

• better management of your records,
• enhanced disaster recovery,
• reduction of data breach risks, and
• lower administrative costs.

However, it can be difficult parting with your business records when you don’t have confidence in your storage solution. To make the right decision in a vendor for your ...

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average office worker still uses 10,000 sheets of paper a year.  Multiply this number times the number of administrative staff in your company and it could represent a mountain of paper that your organization goes through each year.  Not only is this costly and bad for the environment, but it can also lead to major disorganization and loss of productivity.  Just think of all the times you’ve had to search for lost or ...

According to Domo, Email users send 204,166,667 messages per minute per day.  That’s a lot of data!  And when you consider that over 2.1 billion people now use the Internet, that represents even more information being consumed, transferred and shared online.  Most businesses now utilize social media, electronic documents, and cloud applications and even with the amount of digital data growing at a furious rate; paper files and documents are still being utilized nonetheless.  In short, information exists in multiple ...

Storage is an important component of good corporate records management.  After all, your business may have records that have lengthy, if not indefinite retention periods which require you to store documents for many years.  And as piles upon piles of files accumulate, eventually you’re going to find yourself outgrowing your current space, which may lead to a knee jerk decision about where to store your business records.  As a result, your business records may end up at the self ...

The number of data breach occurrences that occurred throughout the world in the month of October 2012 is alarming. The most prominent breach involved the TD Bank’s loss of two backup tapes containing customer names, addresses and social security numbers. TD bank has not disclosed the number of customers affected, although it may potentially involve a large volume of customers from Maine to Florida. While this is the most publicized breach of the month, many other incidents have occurred during ...

There are numerous advantages for choosing an offsite storage solution — including the physical protection and preservation for your business records. Your business may require an offsite storage solution to address the following needs:

• in house space constraints
• long term retention for in-active files
• privacy protection for business documents

Additionally, offsite storage makes certain that your corporate records and files are properly inventoried to meet the request and retrieval demands of an auditing agency.

Your business may periodically schedule an internal ...

Privacy and data security go hand in hand. Federal regulations outlined in Gramm Leach Bliley (GLB), The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) highlight the significance of protecting private business and consumer information. Therefore, a key piece of corporate due diligence is maintaining compliance with privacy legislation. Failure to do so can result in financial and legal sanctions that threaten the long term viability of your business. ...

The requirement to keep documents for a certain period of time presents a variety of challenges — not the least of which is finding adequate storage space. Often, storage decisions are made in haste and driven by an “out of sight and out of mind” mentality. As a result, it’s quite likely that you’re paying unnecessary storage charges for documents that are well past their retention period.

If you’re storing your business records at a mini storage facility, ...