If your house was on fire what would you save?
I grew up with 5 firefighters in my extended family. I remembered talking about house fires so often and what our plan was that I thought it was something that would happen every couple years. In fact, when our house did catch on fire the night after Halloween when I was a child, we were out of the house and at the neighbors before we knew what was going on. We had a plan in place and we had reviewed the plan so many times that we all instinctively knew what to do and where to go.
Now the answer for what most people would do would be to grab this or get that, to make sure something irreplaceable, like photo albums, critical documents, or family pets, get out of the home safely. The one major change since I was a kid was now we would probably add our phones and computers to that list.
It may not be that different for businesses, but the number one thing you can do is to think about it now and have a plan for if it ever happens. The precious things may not be photos or pets, or even physical inventory since that is likely insured. Most financial assets are usually off premises and many employees can work from anywhere these days, so the building isn’t crucial.
What spells the difference between surviving a disaster is the information needed to restore and run the business. If that information is locked up in file cabinets that no longer exist, the likelihood of the business surviving is doubtful indeed.
There are many proven reasons to get rid of paper. AIIM asked customers who implanted paper-free processes for their top three biggest benefits.
What have been the biggest benefits from your paper-free processes? (Max THREE)
Faster Customer Response (Internal/External)
50%
Reduced Staff Resource/Higher Productivity
42%
Visibility/Access for other non-process staff
42%
Fewer Errors
33%
Better monitoring and visibility of status and workloads
25%
Improved remote/mobile accessibility
25%
Improved corporate sustainability and environmental friendliness
17%
Cleaner audit trail and regulatory compliance
17%
A Business Continuity Plan is something all businesses need to look at and going paperless is a major part of the data recovery strategy. Risk mitigation and data recovery are two crucial pillars of a strong business continuity plan. A Document management cloud solution allows a company to mitigate the risks of crippling information loss. Just adopting a document management solution and using it for managing and securing critical documents is step one. Effective off-site backup and off-site storage of those backups further reduces risk. Adoption of cloud solution reduces the risk even further by shifting data recovery responsibility to a company who thinks about data recovery and security issues every minute of every day.
If your business was flooded/on fire/hit by an earthquake, what would you save?
Speak with a Document Solutions and Business Continuity Specialist
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