PROTECT YOUR DOCUMENTS
Imaging101 can help you protect your information against theft and disasters. You can now secure your mission-critical business documents electronically from unauthorized access or loss. This becomes a key component of your disaster-recovery/business resumption plan.
Document security is vital in many document management applications. Compliance requirements for certain documents can be quite complex depending on the type of documents. For instance the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements dictate that medical documents have certain security requirements. The Imaging101 document management system provides a rights management module that allows an administrator to give access to documents to only certain people or groups of people.
Keeping a business going 24/7 is the task of business continuity planning. While often mentioned with disaster recovery, business continuity planning is the overall strategy for ensuring that operations continue in the event of any disruption-natural or man-made.
Disaster recovery is more narrowly focused on getting an organization’s IT infrastructure going again, a subset of business continuity. Because the lifeblood of most businesses today is represented by electronic documents, Document Imaging/Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has a key role to play in continuity. After all, without access to the most vital electronic documents, a business is dead in the water.
Document imaging/ECM technologies allow the creation of centralized repositories where all vital corporate information can reside. The method of storage will vary depending on how critical the content is to the company-from off-site back up tapes to redundant, mirrored sites separated by geography and on different power grids. A strong continuity plan will show you that not all content is critical. Companies must prioritize their content to determine how quickly content needs to be back online in the event of a disaster.
Business continuity begins with a sound plan and high-level executive support. Next, mission-critical processes and the entities on which they are dependent must be determined, followed by a business impact assessment to determine the impact of a disruption, or losing, those processes. Defining what a business considers a disaster and explaining how key processes will be recovered are the next steps in the plan.
A crisis operations center should also be established with procedures for chain of command and other roles. Finally, don’t forget to update and test the plan annually or as business needs change. Effectively delivering on a continuity plan will enhance your ability not only to recover during a system failure but will enable you to better define the priority of your business content and improve your overall ECM strategy.