When Disaster Strikes – What a Recovery Plan Means for your Company

Businesses use Information Technology to quickly and effectively process data every day. Employee communications via email, phone, smartphone apps and corporate social networks get faster and faster, enabling colleagues and clients near and far to get your information immediately.  All this electronic data (EDI) is critical for business operations, from transmitting purchase orders and payments to communicating policies and procedures.   Whether in-house or off-premise, you rely on your IT support systems to be up-to-date and work seamlessly to enable the transmission of data, store your information and give you access to what you need when you need it. What happens when it all stops? What happens if that back-up system and recovery solution you thought was infallible – fails your organization? Or more aptly, “Are you prepared for a natural disaster that totally destroys your location and disables all systems?”

Every organization should have a detailed Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) in case of a tragic event. More than 70 percent of today’s businesses would fail within three weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood. And, in recent years, there has been an uptick in the wrath of nature – Hurricane Harvey in Houston and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the floods and wildfires in Montecito, CA all paralyzed businesses. It is important to remember, it can happen to you. While every business is different and has different geographic locations, with documents and data stored in-house, there are no guarantees that natural disasters and other unforeseen factors won’t sidestep your business. No business is immune from disasters, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Businesses of all sizes create and manage large volumes of paper, electronic information and data, all of which are vital to the survival of your business. You need uninterrupted operations, security of data and the ability to recover quickly. The impact can be significant if you are a victim of corrupted data from hardware failure, human error, hacking or malware. Be prepared! A plan for data backup and restoration of your physical and electronic data is essential to avoid operational downtime and loss of data.

How do you prepare?

Ensuring that your electronic data is efficiently managed and converting all important documents to digitized copies is the best way to drive a recovery plan.

The best system in order to do this is an Intelligent Information Management(IIM) system.  This protects content and enables you to fully reboot operations from the cloud.  It is also important to learn what is needed to sufficiently implement this plan.  It will also guarantee that you can recover quickly and in accordance with your organization’s unique requirements if something happens.

Additionally, an enterprise content management (ECM) solution is perfect for data storage. These solutions will enable an efficient, secure recovery.  With data digitized in your content management system and deployed in the cloud, you can easily set up a new location or redirect services outside of the disaster zone.

What about day-to-day content management?

Even without the consideration of disaster striking, file digitization goes a long way to streamline your business. Here are some astonishing facts about the amount of time and money the average organization spends managing documents manually:

• On average, the cost in labor to file one document is $20.
• Between two percent and five percent of an organization’s files are lost or misfiled on any given day.
• Companies spend an average of $120 in labor to find one misfiled document.
• Approximately 25 hours are spent recreating each lost document.
• Approximately ten to twelve percent of documents are not found on the first attempt.
• The average employee spends 400 hours per year searching for documents.
• It takes an average of ten minutes per paper document to retrieve, copy and re-file.
• 60 percent of employee time is spent working with documents.
• 90 percent of a business’s information is in documents.
• Each four-drawer file cabinet holds an average of 10,000 to 12,000 documents, takes up nine square feet of floor space and costs $1,500 per year.

Without some type of content management system or program where you can centrally store all of your digital files, the possibility of losing digital files is also a risk. Konica Minolta can help you to strategize what is needed for your business, whether it is an onsite or hosted recovery.

Think about the state of your organization if disaster strikes.

• Will boxes of paper files be floating down the street?
• Will you lose important documents that are stacked and stored in files in your basement?
• Can you move to a temporary location and start your business day with no loss?

If you don’t have a Disaster Recovery Plan, or if yours needs to be updated with the latest digital technology, Konica Minolta can help you develop your strategy to protect your critical business information. Contact us today!

– Sources: Gartner Group, AIIM, US Dept of Labor, Imaging Magazine, Coopers & Lybrand