Why Should You Choose Digital Archiving over Physical Archiving
Initially, only libraries preserved archives, but today commercial enterprises, government agencies, colleges, non-profit organizations, and religious groups all save records. Today, document archiving, whether physical or digital, is a widespread corporate practice.
This is partly due to the need to provide proof in litigation, regulatory, or compliance situations. In addition, many companies are switching to electronic records management, which can create significant cost savings.
However, many companies still struggle to drive the adoption of electronic document archiving and effectively archive documents.
Both digital and physical archiving have pros and cons. Organizations that keep documents in electronic form face several challenges, including cybersecurity threats, the risk of human error, and the high costs associated with storing, maintaining, and backing up data.
On the other hand, organizations that keep records in paper form face several challenges, including storage, preservation, and retrieval costs. Moreover, the physical document must be preserved and scanned.
The advent of digital document archiving has addressed most of these challenges. However, many organizations are still not sure whether to keep digital records or physically archive their data.
What are physical archives?
The practice of archiving paper records is sometimes referred to as physical archives. However, storing critical information on paper, such as medical data, legal documents, customer files, or conference papers, might be the wrong choice. Paper cannot be preserved for an extended amount of time, and factors such as moisture, mold, mildew, and poor handling practices may all wreak havoc on your important data.
There is no assurance that paper will even survive for a short time. Microforms were created in the 1980s due to the limited life of paper. They are more durable than paper, although they can be easily destroyed due to their small size. Another downside of employing microforms is that they necessitate the use of cumbersome equipment in order to access the information.
What is digital archiving?
Digital document archiving became possible with the advent of the scanner. Scanners capture a digital picture of a document, which is then readily saved on a server or hard disk. The most significant benefit of digitally preserving documents is that your data cannot be altered.
You will also conserve space because you will only be utilizing virtual space. You can remove the requirement to keep large physical documents by opting for digital archiving.
When you scan a document, you can save it in a variety of image formats, including JPEG, PDF, TIFF, and BMP. A scanned PDF document may be made text searchable by using optical character recognition. This will make it incredibly easy for you to find certain information at any moment. PDF documents may be reduced to a very tiny size, making storage and transmission simple.
You will never have to worry about losing your information if you digitally archive your payroll documents, HR records, proof of delivery, or lab books.
Benefits of going digital with your data
The following are some of the main advantages of digital data archiving:
- Digital archiving ensures long-term preservation, long-term access, and long-term data support — With important data, it is crucial to ensure long-term preservation, long-term access, and long-term data support. Digital archiving makes this possible.
- Digital archiving enables better access to data — Archiving solutions offer searchable databases and enable you to access and re-use data easily. Legal departments, compliance officers, and investigative agencies can harness this digital archive to conduct investigations, identify wrongdoing and any form of corporate misconduct.
- Digital archiving helps you ensure compliance — Archiving solutions also help businesses minimize the risk of regulatory compliance breaches. For example, businesses are required to have email retention policies and maintain all related email data for a certain period. Email archiving solutions include built-in features that help businesses meet these requirements.
- Digital archiving enables consistent workflows across departments — Digital archiving ensures consistent usage of data across departments and facilitates the migration of data between departments.
- Digital archiving is cost-effective and scalable — By moving data into digital archives, the data can be used more efficiently and savings can be made. Physical storage can be costly and cumbersome, and it’s difficult to upgrade once you need more space.
Although digital archiving has many advantages, you may still be apprehensive about implementing it. However, you should not be concerned if document archiving is not your core expertise. Data archiving may be easily outsourced to a service provider. Outsourcing is not only cost-effective, but it may also save you time and effort, both of which can be put into your primary business operations.
Wrapping up
The advantages of digital archiving are obvious and numerous.
You should choose digital archiving over physical archiving because it has dramatically reduced the costs of storage, preservation, and retrieval, it provides better, faster, and more efficient access to records. Additionally, digital archiving allows you to access records whenever you need them, from anywhere, at any time. It allows you to preserve records for as long as you need them. With digital archiving, you can store data indefinitely, as long as you maintain your digital archiving solution.
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