On Feb 5, 2008, at 12:00 AM, RECMGMT-L automatic digest system wrote:
> From: "Link, Gary M." <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Avg. Cost offsite storage vs. onsite
>
>> If the goal is to reduce the real estate foot print then storing them
> in media format is the best course of action.
>
> I believe everyone here will agree that the ability to convert 10,000
> boxes of storage into the size of a piece of Texas Toast is the
> only way
> to go. Does everyone agree?? :~(
> <
>
> Hugh,
Snip from Gary
>
> I don't agree.
And I agree with you. But I also believe that you will agree with me
that moving all your records offsite to Sloppy Joe's Storage may not
always be the best course of action. That cost is not the basis of
rationale for records management! It is the basic rationale for
offsite storage though. Once you choose to always select the cheapest
vendor you start down another slippery slope where you are no longer
managing records. In fact, the movement to the lowest cost offsite
option is the beginning of poor records management.
Management desires the lowest costs right up until they find
themselves in court like TJ MAXX or GE Money or Penneys or a host of
other records management failures that open the door to massive
liability.
> If you have retention schedules in place and destroy your
> records accordingly, it's possible that it can cost less to store the
> paper than to do the conversion.
What conversion? Records are born digital now. Just ask the IT
people who think they are in control until the first subpoena appears
and then they call for records management to bail them out. This is
very similar to the large storage company that talks about their
proficiency until they lose a box or a tape and then "That is not our
problem, because we are so big that your problem doesn't matter to
us. You gave up the right to accuracy when you selected the Walmart
approach to records storage."
> Also, from a information protection
> standpoint, storing those 10,000 boxes could be a form of dispersal,
> which records managers know is one of the four methods of protecting
> vital records. So if the storage company loses your one piece of Texas
> Toast sized storage media, you've lost all of your information. But if
> they lose only one box of paper, you've only lost .0001 of your
> information.
But what happens when they burn down the records warehouse and 20,000
clients are missing 100% of their paper back up. The truth is that
over time, all copies of the records move offsite. And not just the
original and the copy but 6 or 7 other copies that manifest
themselves over time. But the fever to get it offsite moves it all
offsite.
In fact, the biggest argument to get it all offsite is that the IT
department keeps the original so the paper is just the back up.
>> ...... storing those 10,000 boxes could be a form of dispersal,
>> which records managers know is one of the four methods of protecting
>> vital records.
Eliminating the need for 10,000 cubic feet of storage by keeping one
extra copy of the Ultrium cartridge or the DVD is the argument of
Disk to Disk or Disk to Disk to Tape (D2D2T)
I have stated for some time that the records manager lost control of
their program and the quality in their records management program
when they allowed "Hostage Fees" to emerge with little fight on their
part.
Records managers allowed further deterioration when they permitted
companies to store their records with little or no insurance coverage
and liability. The massive profits of offsite storage with almost
zero liability is how offsite storage companies attract investors.
But the goods news is that many of our membership have eliminated the
Hostage fees and they require some level of insurance coverage. Soon
Congress will pass some of the liability for lost personal and
corporate information downstream to the entity responsible for the
loss rather than punish the owner of the records who acted in good
faith by selecting a custodian for the records. The problem though is
that records managers refer to a chain of custody but then allow
companies to store the records who deny any partnership in the
custody. The intent of Congress to spread the liability to all
involved is so close to becoming a reality that the big storage
companies have created an association to lobby against their
responsibility for lost records and Identity Theft and competitive
espionage.
Snip from Peter:
> What Hugh is pointing out is that RMs
> need to be expanding their horizons and start looking at risk
> management of
> the items under their control. Whether we're storing paper or
> digital with
> an offsite vendor doesn't matter, we need to also focus on managing
> the risk
> and holding the appropriate party or parties responsible for any
> losses.
Exactly. Note that the last three paragraphs in the article refer to
new standards, new technologies (Rosetta Stone, Paper Disk, etc.) but
they have not caught on due to the costs involved. Management always
moves to lower cost solutions. But a new force is working on them:
1) SOX piercing the corporate veil, 2) Personal Liability, 3)
Identity Theft Legislation, 4) ESI and Rule 26, and most importantly
the attempts by other countries to steal information, technologies
and markets.
The business world is in a real war where laws and treaties do not
protect them. And CEO's and CFO's and Board members can be sued or
imprisoned for failure to protect. This is a huge leverage point for
RMs. But so far the IT people have seized the high ground by going
to evaulting, D2D and other technologies to try to protect the
records. Records Managers must infuse themselves into this solution
or it will fail.
Snip from Pat:
> From: Patrick Cunningham <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Avg. Cost offsite storage vs. onsite
>
> Hugh, I'm going to respectfully disagree. A number of us have been
> trying to pound sense into the IT storage management world lately when
> some vendor gets up on his high horse and proclaims "Image it all!
> Storage is so cheap that you can keep it forever!"
Image what? It is all digital to begin with. I recently sold a vault
to a bank based on
his assumption that he had 180 people typing away in the bank. The
reality was that
only one typewriter even existed. Everybody was using computers. The
paper in a great majority of instances (other than the Note and Deed
of Trust and the Insurance Policy) were digital files.
Even looking at the offsite warehouses, paper is being shredded at a
frantic pace. We are moving to
keeping the boxed records for three years and this is down from 16
years as the average over the years.
Records management must revisit the model. If 97% of records are born
digital then you would only need to image 300 boxes out of 10,000
potential. Imaging both sides as a worst case situation is only
$12,000. The storage cost of 10,000 boxes offsite would be $18,000
per year not counting retrievals and replacing. Not to mention the
10,000 boxes at $7.60 Hostage Fee and the eventual shredding after
their lifetime.
Snip from Pat:
> I'm not in love with paper or commercial records centers. I'd just as
> soon be rid of them both. But I cannot walk in to my management today
> and justify imaging 300,000 cubic feet of mostly dead records that are
> in storage. No one is going to write me a check for $30 million to get
> that done. Most of those records will be shredded in the next five
> years and are rarely referenced. They are being retained for legal
> reasons or because the IRS isn't done with us yet.
If you will shred them in five years, imagine how much sooner you can
shred them if you have the best evidence record, "the original," on
the hard drive. And if you are not already D2D I bet you soon will
be. Remember back in the Diversified case how Mobil had thousands of
boxes destroyed but it was only a few that they really attached a
high value to. (Drilling Data I believe.)
In one recent fire over 1 million boxes were destroyed but also 1
million tapes went with them. I wonder how many records managers
thought "Hey! Maybe I should store my media with one company and my
boxes with another?"
But my argument from the beginning is that arguing that storing
offsite is cheaper than storing on site is no longer a valid
argument. That a records manager can be better than that! That
storing one site might make more sense for certain things. Stop
thinking about cheaper in a one dimensional sense. What is really
cheaper in one sense can be way more expensive in the long term.
Storing records with one company everywhere may be cheaper or maybe
not. In most cases a distributed deal can be better. But the best
thing is that an Owner Manager is on site and losses are far reduced.
Have you ever been at a small records storage company when they can't
find a box or a tape? They go nuts! They turn the place inside out
and they find it. Why is that? Because the Owner of the business
finds out about a mistake with hours of its occurrence. In larger
companies, the Owner find out 45 days later. An employee earning a
relatively low salary is the one deciding whether to stay late or
work all night and guess how the decision goes?
But the Owner sees massive liability, a lost client they worked hard
to win and they cancel lunch and dinner and they find it. That is why
we aren't reading each week about ABC Storage losing tapes. They
store them in real vaults and use high quality tracking software and
every account is important and every lost tape is a disaster to
them. Just as you see in the interview with GE Money, they care
about the lost tape. The Storage Company says "Well with our volume,
losses are just part of the human equation." I bet the CEO of
Penney's doesn't agree with that logic.
I bet if the the RM or the IT guy place a white paper about how
things could be different that he or she would be interested about now.
Snip from Pat:
> And one more thing... in almost every one of those data breaches, what
> was lost was electronic information -- not paper, so it is a red
> herring to suggest that we stop storing paper because of the data
> breaches.
My argument is that storing offsite because it is cheaper is not the
whole argument. And storing with a big company because it makes the
records management job easier because it is one invoice instead of 20
invoices is a ridiculous point of view. Quality should be the
determining point followed closely by accountability. Only then
should cost be a factor. And the discussion the other day was all
about cost.
> But to suggest that we should image everything for the sake of
> security, well I don't think that is a reasonable approach to
> business.
> Nor is keeping everything in paper, for that matter.
And I agree with that point of view as long as the quality and
accountability issue is there. But with 50,000+ corporations where
are the headlines about them losing their own tapes. The headlines
are always about someone else.
> If you have existing paper
> records, make sure that they are all being managed and that you
> disposition them as quickly as possible -- and hold your storage
> vendor
> accountable for their security.
See we agreed about what it is about after all.
> I think Hugh said that with his tongue firmly in cheek ... apparently
> many of you missed his smiley at the end of that sentence.
>
> "I believe everyone here will agree that the ability to convert 10,000
> boxes of storage into the size of a piece of Texas Toast is the
> only way
> to go. Does everyone agree?? :~( "
As Nolene pointed out I had tongue firmly in cheek on that
statement . In fact, I doubt that there is any issue that you can say
"You should always do it this way." But SOX, ESI and IDentity Theft
Legislation and soon joint responsibility for information exposures
or losses are making this a new world. The Board of Directors now
know what Records Management is all about. This should work to your
advantage if you place accountability above low storage costs going
forward.
Compare records management to cars. Cars got seat belts, then driver
air bags, then passenger air bags, now side air bags, anti-roll over
differentials and so on. Did human life become more valuable? Did
security features drop in price? No, new legislation and fear of
litigation forced automakers to step up. But records storage
companies deny liability and have hostage fees to keep you from
moving. When will records management and CEO step up and force
accountability. It has to start with the RM because the CEO has no
idea Hostage Fees are in effect. RMs know they are compromised. If a
few companies fought them openly they would go away because they are
restraint of trade. Ideally ARMA would fight this as a national
issue. It would be the single greatest thing ARMA could do to
improve the overall quality and accountability that RMs can expect
from their storage companies. After all the legitimate threat to pull
your records was what made people respond to you. You have lost that
in the last few years and you need to get it back.
ARMA's next President will come from this Listserv membership as many
of the others have in previous years. If this removal of hostage
fees was made a key platform issue, the fees would go away and the
industry would become more secure. Congress is doing their part.
Free movement of records to the most secure vendor would
revolutionize the Records management solution. But instead hundreds
of thousands, millions, of records are stuck with vendors with no
incentive to change because the records are hostage. It is time for
a change. If you let it continue on it will become a standard practice.
Until that time, don't look for cost benefits, look for performance
in the equation and control by the RM is the way to achieve that.
Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
[log in to unmask]
(610) 756-4440 Fax (610) 756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM
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