News - 2007 June How safe are your archives? A recent story from one of our customers highlights just how important it is for companies to address the question of archiving paper documents and having adequate back up and disaster recovery plans. Many of you will have seen on TV the disasterous results of flooding in the North of England and other areas. The cost to private homes and businesses will run into Millions if not Billions not to mention the sad loss of life. Whilst immediate cleaning and rebuilding are the obvious costs many more "hidden" costs are those associated with the loss of business and the destruction of the information you rely on to support your business and your service to your customers. A recent client of Rent IT has been undertaking an ongoing process to scan and record in digital format archived documents. In this case using our wide format A0 scanners to record technical drawings from the "Pre CAD" days. Having completed his scanning and returned the A0 scanner last week our client followed up this week with a brief E-Mail- "Thanks for that. It's lucky that we decided to scan all the drawings in, as we've just been flooded and lost a lot of the original hard copies!" This should certainly be a pre-cautionary tale to those who rely on large amounts of paper records in order to undertake there business. Whilst the recent floods have made the headlines because of the extent of them, almost on a daily basis there will be a company somewhere in the country who will have suffered loss of paperwork due to fire, burst pipes, vandalism, carelessness etc. Your disaster recovery plan may well include details on where you can get temporary offices, where to hire IT equipment (Rent IT of course!) and similar details on how to get your business back up and running. But what about your paper records? If these are lost what copies do you have? Can you ever replace them? Digitising your old records may well be a daunting task but the ultimate benefits are worth the effort and cost. Not only do you now have these records safely preserved but you may now have the option of disposing of the original paperwork, something that may free up valuable space on your premises or even reduce external storage costs. A further advantage is that these records may now be available throughout your company. No longer is time involved raking through dusty archives. In addition your documents can now be easily transferred via electronic format to other office or even the other side of the world. There are of course outside bodies who can provide these services and whilst in some cases this may be a solution in many cases this presents its own difficulties- Can you afford to be without these documents if they are away getting scanned? Do staff need access to them on a daily basis? What security implications are there if these are away from your premised and being accessed by "others"? What will be the cost? Often in-house scanning can be achieved at far lower cost. What will be the timescale? Having all documents away for scanning may just not be practical , if scanning "in-house" it can be carried out at a pace to suit your available resources. These are just a few of the decision you make once you have made the decision to digitize your archives. So whether you are an engineering company or a lawyers, employment agency or museum. Digitising and back up of printed materials should be part of your plans for improving your company. Once you have to reach for the disaster recovery plans and put them into action it is often to late for these vital records. As well as A0 scanners for archiving and digitisation of technical drawings Rent IT offers a range of A4 and A3 duplex high speed scanners for archiving and digitisation of more "standard" office archives.

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