I was at a recent Information Security Conference and a woman came up
to me and said "Oh you're that guy that is negative to the offsite
storage industry." I was sort of surprised. Later in the
conference another offsite provider stated that they found my remarks
helpful to identifying market segment to pursue. They found
targeting those responsive to secure storage to be effective in
garnering new clients. The LA police motto of "Serve and Protect" is
an excellent model for the offsite storage, information destruction,
media storage and offsite back up industry.
These comments coming so close together created a dichotomy that
might have seemed odd at another time, but I was at NAID, and they
have developed a high level certification program. It established
benchmarks and those failing an audit are no longer worthy of a
Certification. What makes it especially rigorous is that each and
every site of a company must pass their audit to maintain the
Certification. Talk about pressure to perform. (Wait is this starting
to sound like a Cialis/Viagra commercial?)
Obviously Certification favors the well run, properly managed site.
Since management becomes more difficult as organizations increase in
size, some of the names you would expect to seek certification cannot
pass the muster. (Or is that Mustard since you have been talking
about Mustard lately.)
So it appears "Size does matter" but maybe not in the way we hear on
sitcoms, etc. (See how I kept myself out of trouble there.) Our
industry has seen a great deal of consolidation in the last decade.
Megacenters rise up in regional areas across the country. Smaller
warehouses/records centers that housed 150,000 or 250,000 are being
replaced by some vendors with cavernous facilities. These facilities
may house 2 million, 3 million boxes or more in a single facility.
Over the course of the one month I was traveling, I was in California
talking with an offsite storage company, a huge auto manufacturer
records management consultant, in New Mexico at a high security
facility and then in Texas at an offsite storage company in Austin,
West Texas and then back to the East Coast for a meeting with an
Upstate New York offsite storage company. One theme repeated itself,
"Boxes are being lost!", and not in the way of tapes in the news.
These losses were simply the consolidation of warehouses leading to
boxes disappearing in Ginormous warehouses. This is not the "We
moved some boxes around and it was misplaced and we will get back to
you this afternoon." kind of loss.
This ripple in the pond seemed to track across the country. So much
so that Certified Destruction companies are using their reputation to
move into records management, media vaulting and so on. Well run
local offsite storage companies are seeing inquiries from the Fortune
500 running from a problem since they make more requests they are
seeing the problem first.
One effect is the movement of tapes to independent operators or the
movement to disk to disk to eliminate an existing vendor. Will this
hasten the demise of box storage?
Another trend that was mentioned is the huge changeover from delivery
schedules. In the past a request from Monday prior to noon was
responded to by a delivery the next day before noon. 24 hour turn
around was the norm. Today the schedule for some firms present 48
hours as the Standard. Anything shorter is an emergency rush and the
delivery fee is much higher. This makes the decision to keep boxes
on the shelf even more expensive. So we seem to come full circle
where the smaller, more efficient and more secure records storage
vendor has a place.
We are all quick to jump on IT for failures but these two items may
have very negative consequences for Records Management. They speak
to your efficiency and worse your accuracy and trust.
Am I seeing the glass half full here?
As a barometer of our times, are you seeing a greater volume of
misplaced boxes from your offsite storage provider?
If the box is lost, how long until you get it back? If ever?
Hugh Smith
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