Sounds like an obvious statement with a serious overtone and it is. The subject is Business Data Records. Old new borrowed and blue.

The inspiration for this muse is a recent exercise to clear the office loft space absolutely jammed full of paper files and cardboard boxes dating back decades. A kind of summer spring clean exercise mostly involving a trip down memory lane and ultimately a shredding service.

Attention turned to computer systems containing active dormant or obsolete business records, customer and prospect data records.

Where they are contained was surprisingly complex especially within off site systems which comprised various modern-day Filing cabinets and storage facilities (Data Storage and Back-Ups on and off-site).

For Photographers this might be a collection of options to include Cloud Based Server storage, Hard Disc Drives (HDD) or Solid Sate Drives (SSD) Direct Access Storage Drives (DAS) or even Network Attached Storage Drives (NAS). One thing is certain, it is perilous to rely on working PC’s or Laptop’s to act as a storage or back up device.

For Photographers and Videographers, business record collections are dominated by image libraries so vast they would utterly amaze Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who is credited with recording the worlds first photograph in 1826 made in a camera.

Technology has moved on a bit since then with enormous numbers of images being stored in small portable boxes, which in turn act as miniature warehouses.

All these valuable data property assets are accessible with virtual keys in the form of logons, passwords and, more commonly, codes to authenticate the identity of the person &/or machine trying to gain entry to the vault. Nothing new there.

Questions are; how safe and secure are these storage facilities? Have they been tested? Is their portability or remoteness a weakness?

Perspective is needed. Identifying and categorising records into 1) mission critical 2) Must keep for specified period 3) nice to keep for longer 4) must jettison is one way of looking at this task.

Top tips:

Organise your records

Secure records that are important to you or your customers or organisations with tax or legal clout

Spring clean, tidy up or scrap as a matter of procedure

Check Insurance cover for Data and Systems repair recovery and legal liabilities to others

Cyber & Data insurance has become a must purchase insurance protection for businesses because ultimately all these critically important systems and Data can never be 100% protected with security measures.