Thinking Long-Term: the business benefit of digital preservation

Maintaining a clear perspective is arguably the first step to tackling preservation problems. In the records management industry, there is a struggle to shift business focus from the everyday, short term course of business operations, to being proactive when it comes to records that need care and protection. Organisations need to understand that the longer term accessibility of valued information assets is essential for a variety of reasons. There are plenty of reasons why current business needs attention, but what is consistently being neglected is a strong approach to navigating such icebergs as technology obsolescence (what happens when regulators can’t access the file formats you used to keep company records?) to ensure that long-term digital records are sustained.

There are two key business benefits that organisations can achieve through digitally preserving their long-term critical information. The first is that by improving decision making, managing operational costs, and retaining competitive advantages, value can be realised. The second is that through the observance of both legal and regulatory mandates, alongside the anticipation of technological modification, risk can be mitigated.

Indeed, 89% of participants surveyed in The Governance of Long-Term Digital Information: IGI 2017 Benchmark report identified ‘Statutory, Regulatory, and/or Legal Operations’ as the defining reason for digital preservation. This supports the argument that identifying and prioritising the care of long-term records is in everyone’s best interests. Furthermore, the process of ensuring that long-term business critical records are both authentic and readable for as long as they are required, spans both the value and risk spectrum.

Many companies could see a significant decrease in risk and subsequently a substantial increase in reward, by anticipating the preservation and access requirements of records over an extended period, and by transferring them to the most suitable environment. Organisations across the board can lower certain costs associated with their production systems, whilst equally maintaining a stable and competitive advantage. There are also numerous legal, regulatory and statutory requirements that organisations need to comply with, and access to securely stored and original company records is a foundational aspect of meeting this compliance.

Businesses also need to reduce risk by anticipating the inevitable transformation of technology. The industry is fully aware that this change will occur, and stands confident it will take place once every few years. As a result, businesses need to be able to both audit information systems and identify integral information resources which are sitting in systems and which are not capable of responsibly protecting long-term records.

Long term retention periods and high standards for the admittance to readable, authentic and trusted electronic records are stimulating the need for proactive digital archiving strategies and capabilities. Just as humans developed a systematic method of arranging paper records by indexing and then storing them under the right conditions, we now need to act decisively to instill a protection service for the value and availability of long-term business records. The result of which will allow business operations to continue and prosper.