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Records management oversights leave companies facing archive abyss
~ Iron Mountain advises organisations to refresh records management policies as MiFID milestone moves closer ~

With only eight months until the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) comes into force, Iron Mountain, the global leader in information protection and storage services, is urging businesses to re-examine and realign records management policies.

MiFID, which applies from November 2007, will mean that records managers in financial institutions have to further refine indexing and retrieval processes to ensure that auditors have access to the vital information stored within a company's archive.

To encourage companies to spend time on this now and avoid hefty fines later in the year, Iron Mountain has issued its top three tips for a flexible, searchable archive.

Store, don't hoard

The number one cause of overspend in storage is the 'Blanket Policy'. Fearful of being penalised for insufficient retention, companies fail to discriminate, storing every document for up to 50 years, regardless of its importance. Iron Mountain estimates that 20 - 40 per cent of its new clients' documents could safely be destroyed, by developing and implementing a legally credible records retention policy.

Flex your index

A costly error made by companies is to create storage policies that bear no relation to the everyday life of the office. Records management should be adapted to business, not the other way round. Taking the right approach can save hours of expensive labour - and this is where a records management expert can help advise on the best way of shaping a company's archive and its indexing.

Plan for the worst

Effective records management is a vital element on which a company will depend on when disaster strikes. While many companies have a disaster recovery plan, it's crucial that the records management plan runs in parallel, to ensure employees have access to the information they need, if and when systems go down.

“Cleaning up the archive will not only help companies to ensure they are compliant but it will also reduce the amount of money spent on hoarding information which is no longer needed,” said Andy Maurice, Head of Consultancy at Iron Mountain. “Office space in the UK is at an all time low, keeping information which is no longer needed is wasteful.” “A well-organised archive will also dramatically decrease the time taken to access business critical information - vital for audit and legal purposes,” he added.