How Moving Your Business Records Off Premises Makes Them Easier To Access

Part of the essential nature of scaling a business involves being a generalist in terms of responsibilities in the early stages. You’ll start with numerous essential processes in house out of sheer necessity. Over time, developing the optimal workflow for your enterprise depends on your growth pattern, with no two businesses overlapping entirely.

Despite these differences - while each business requires its supporting processes to be unique to its needs - there are certain commonalities that tend to apply irrespective of business type. One such shared pattern that’s shared among many successful organizations is outsourcing the bulk of paper record-keeping to a leading Electronic Content Management provider for both simplification and savings.

At first glance, there seems to be a substantial downside to moving business records off premises. How will the organization access the essentials in a timely fashion?

Digital Access

The first and perhaps most obvious advantage to outsourcing storage and management of business records is the ability to access them from anywhere through digitization. Competent ECMs provide integration guidance and process improvement suggestions to enable your departments to better mesh with their offerings and create a smoother transition from paper.

Digitization immediately provides your overall business innumerable benefits that are orders of magnitude better than even the best paper filing systems - namely, interdocument full text search capabilities with optical character recognition technology employed post scan. Employees who need access to the same documents no longer necessitate copies - all employees with the proper credentials can view and modify documents concomitantly, permissions granting.

Direct Access

Going digital doesn’t necessarily mean discarding of physical records. In some cases, retention guidelines stipulate hanging on to paper copies until certified total destruction is permitted.

The obvious immediate benefit to off-site storage is leveraging economies of scale. A partner dedicated to housing documents should provide armed security, temperature and humidity controlled environments to better preserve paper and other media, and easy catalogued access through a combination of RTLS and passive RFID to ensure your data is both properly preserved and easily accessible for years to come.

Ensure your off-site document storage partner offers 24/7 access to its facilities.

Provide Security (For Unforeseen Challenges)

While off-site document archival and digitization facilitates pure ease of access, that doesn’t matter if the document is stolen.

The physical separation of concerns provided by an off-site storage facility - particularly one utilized by multiple organizations - give you a strategic advantage against identity thieves and amoral competitors. Even in the scenario where a nefarious competitor successfully gains access to the storage facility, they still need credentials to your secure access point just to discover which physical documents belong to your business. With armed guards, closed circuit infrared cameras, alarms, and a maze of effectively meaningless extraneous data to sift through and contend with, even the most determined competitor will likely decide against the attempt.

Despite the literal disconnect between your records and your offices, a proper integration with an Electronic Content Management resource allows your business to strengthen security, save money, and most surprisingly, improve intellig