Experts Urge Companies To Protect Data
Published: May 21, 2006
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Before hurricane season, experts in document and data protection advise businesses to take steps to protect company records, both in paper and digital form.
Paper Records
•Make a priority list of the most important records to be backed up or protected. Focus first on documents that, if lost, would cost the company money or time.
Katherine Cronin, a Xerox Corp. vice president, says that as a rule businesses should consider how quickly they might need a document as a way to help prioritize which ones to copy and store.
Other records might not be urgent, but should be backed up, stored and kept in perpetuity such as tax returns, corporate minutes, articles of incorporation, licenses, payroll, and finance records.
•Scanning documents into a database may not be enough. "If you're a law office, you don't just want millions of scanned pages to look through on a PC a page at a time," Cronin says.
Good document archiving systems index the document type, author, creation date, destruction date and links to other relevant documents. (Imagine searching for a five-page vendor contract from a database of 3 million pages.)
Digital Records
•Establish a system of regularly backing up digital files. Work with your IT department or a reputable vendor to back up or "mirror" systems in remote locations.
•Encourage employees to back up their records. This could be as simple as distributing jump drive memory sticks to workers and asking them to back up records they rely on and use regularly.
•Don't forget security. Sending employees off with laptop computers may be an appealing option during a storm. But consider the risks of employees keeping valuable information, such as credit card or Social Security numbers, on laptops and digital storage devices. They could get lost or stolen during a storm. A company is liable for damages from lost information.
•Contact key vendors to get information about their plan for protecting your digital data. For example, if an outside payroll company processes employee checks, make sure you know their procedures for staying in operation if a storm hits.
