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‘What should we keep, and how long should we keep it?’
Organizations accumulate increasing quantities of paper and electronic records – and incur ever higher storage and management costs along the way. Yet it’s often unclear which records should be kept, for how long, and which can be safely and legally destroyed.
Companies must navigate a sea of laws and regulations - including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and many others - that define obligations for retaining records to ensure transparency and accountability. A growing body of court and regulatory rulings demonstrate that inadequate records management and disposal practices expose organizations to risks of non-compliance and legal liability.
Effective, cost-efficient strategy for retention and destruction
Iron Mountain can help your organization plan and implement a comprehensive and legally credible program for records retention and disposal - and ensure it is systematically applied across all business units and geographical locations.
A well-designed, clearly communicated, and consistently enforced records retention and disposition program can significantly lower your compliance risks and litigation exposure by ensuring that valuable, legally required records are retained for the appropriate period of time, and then disposed of in a secure, well-documented manner.
Reduce your records storage costs
A comprehensive program also helps you lower your information storage and handling costs - by up to 50 percent - by eliminating unnecessary document storage and transferring inactive records to less-costly storage. Further, an effective program helps you streamline access to your remaining records because there are fewer to manage and search.
An Iron Mountain solution often pays for itself
Iron Mountain has extensive experience in delivering retention and destruction solutions:
- We’ve developed and implemented records retention programs for highly regulated organizations, including many Fortune 500 companies
- Our recommendations are backed by comprehensive legal research, ensuring compliance with relevant industry regulations
- We apply records retention schedules to large backfile projects, up to a million cartons or more, so that obsolete records can be properly destroyed
- Customers typically achieve a dramatic reduction in storage volume - from 20 to 50 percent. In fact, records storage savings often pay for the entire development cost of a records management program
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Consulting Services
