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Businesses hold on to thousands of pieces of paper and manual documents. And as time goes on, these accumulate until there’s multiple filing cabinets overflowing with neglected, but important, files that rarely see the light of day. Easily destroyed, thrown away or lost, these documents not only take up valuable room and cost companies thousands in time spent looking for them, but they are also at very serious risk of the elements.

Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods are all common. Even in the UK, we are prone to floods, and have even been known to have the odd earthquake. With the weather getting wilder, making sure that important documents are safe and secure cannot be underestimated. So how can you ensure your important, and confidential business documents are kept safe, should disaster strike?

Document management with Cloud

The only sure fire way to keep your documents safe is by turning to digital practices. Some businesses decide to store documents away from offices and disaster-prone areas, such as at external storage facilities. However even if you decide to go down that route, you can’t guarantee that these will be kept safe from catastrophe such as fire or flood. Digitising your paper archive and current documents using a specialist scanner however will remove the need for storage facilities by enabling them to be stored on widely accessible cloud.

It is always worth backing these documents though as a secondary precaution. Although clouds are secure, if their server goes down, it will stop access which can hinder a businesses’ productivity for a time. Using a central server that is either located on or off site however will provide businesses with a secondary platform to access and store data and provide peace of mind. These are great for both large and small businesses as they are cost-effective to maintain, but there is always the risk that they can be damaged from outside elements. In order to combat this, some service providers store data on multiple servers housed at different geographic locations. So even if one of the servers is destroyed, your documents will still be safe as they are stored on other servers too.

The main benefit of backing up your documents digitally is that when you’re back in business, you can quickly recover your documents and resume operations which minimise disruption to both customers and employees.

Looking to disaster proof offices in London? Find out more about document scanning from Pearl Scan.

What We Can Learn From the Past: Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery plans are essential for any business as downtime can cost SMEs up to £170,000 per disaster. Software provider V1 recently found that only 17% of businesses have incorporated electronic document storage into disaster recovery plans. Disaster can strike at any time; past events such as The Great Fire of London and the Boxing Day tsunami have taught us that, which is why it is important to ensure that some kind of plan is in place to protect essential documents.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is an area of planning designed to protect a business from the effects of unforeseen events such as flood, fire, hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. Such plans try and limit the disruption caused in the wake of a disaster allowing a business to quickly resume crucial everyday functions.

Past Events

There have been many unforeseen events that have happened throughout history which had a huge impact on businesses and communities. These highlight that no matter how much a business prepares, sometimes circumstances are out of its control.
The Great Fire of London was caused by a bakery, but natural disasters are harder to avoid. On average the USA experiences seven hurricanes over a four year period, with three major hurricanes crossing the coast every three years. This highlights the importance of disaster recovery and shows just how important it is for SMEs all over the world. Some countries may not experience hurricanes and extreme weather - however typhoons, thunderstorms, flash flooding and many more disasters affect various parts of the world, increasing the chances of businesses facing some kind of disastrous event at some point.

How to Avoid Disaster

Even if disastrous events are unavoidable in some cases, it doesn’t mean that SMEs shouldn’t take precautions to limit the impact they have. Pearl Scan offers many different document scanning solutions for all businesses, so that no matter the event they can be sure that important documents are safe.

Online cloud storage such as Halogen is also a good idea for businesses looking to implement a disaster recovery plan. This allows employees to upload files to the cloud which can then be accessed from anywhere in the world, on any kind of device. This way if disaster does strike and a company finds themselves out of the office for a while, work can continue as normal in a temporary location. Also, it means if paper documents and records were destroyed, information can still be accessed digitally.