In 1997, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) issued Rule 17a-4(f), which authorized broker-dealers to store their required books and records in electronic format. Broker-dealers who elected to store records electronically were required by the rule to retain a third party (“Designated Third Party” or “D3P”) who had the ability to independently download electronically-stored information to another acceptable medium for the SEC’s review (the “D3P Requirement”). The purpose of this provision was to ensure that, in the event a broker-dealer went out of business or refused to cooperate with the SEC, an independent third party could assist the SEC in retrieving information stored on electronic media.
The amount of information your organization has to manage is growing at an incredible pace, creating new challenges every day. On the one hand, you’re tempted to retain as much data as possible for fear of losing critical information. On the other, there’s the danger of maintaining expired information, which opens you up to operational and financial risks.
The Iron Mountain Escrow service provides physical and electronic vaulting with secure, real-time, online account management.
Historically, data protection laws in the United States have required businesses to adopt "reasonable" information security methods but have not stated in detail what those methods should be.1 The vagueness of these laws can be frustrating, but it also serves a purpose: by keeping data security requirements general, lawmakers avoid locking in solutions that might become obsolete, and give businesses the flexibility to choose measures that are appropriate to their circumstances.
Document conversion has a stinky reputation of being: (1.) Expensive; (2.) disruptive; and (3.) difficult to cost-justify. One of the reasons is that, historically, imaging is thought of in a very binary way. You either image, or you don’t. No gray area. But that mood is changing. What used to be the final act in a business process— scan the paper and shred it—is increasingly at the “front-end” of the process, and is tied to the ensuing business process...whatever it might be. I talked this month with two very thoughtful representatives of the imaging trade, who come at the problem from very different perspectives. And from these chats, I have come away with two basic beliefs: 1. Imaging ain’t what it used to be; and 2. It probably never was.
Holders of patents and other intellectual property balance security with discovery during litigation. They must defend themselves against lawsuits and must assert their rights against infringement. Intellectual property represents the crown jewels of an organization. Revealing details of intellectual property is unwise, but rules of legal discovery may compel exposing proprietary material.
This report identifies five proven ways you can significantly reduce your costs while delivering the records management capabilities your business really needs. Each of them is backed by real-world examples and statistics — and accompanied by specific steps you can take to start saving now.
This report identifies five proven ways you can reshape your information management processes to drive a stronger compliance posture — while helping you maximize the value of your hardcopy and electronic records in the process. Each of them is backed by real-world examples from actual Iron Mountain customers — and accompanied by specific steps you can take to start improving compliance today.
Gain insight into how companies of all sizes protect, store and destroy business records in order to meet compliance requirements and improve operational efficiencies in the 2010 Compliance Benchmark Report from Iron Mountain. This survey-based report is based on risk assessments from over 3,500 professionals representing organizations of all sizes and verticals. Download the report to see how your organization stacks up.
In today’s mortgage environment, there is no room for error. Origination volumes are down, the refinancing boom is beginning to unwind, and the ever-changing regulatory environment is your new normal. The management of your loan documents, both paper and electronic, has never been more important.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the federal statute governing the protection of patient information, has been a part of the healthcare landscape for years. Now that same landscape is changing rapidly with the growing adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).
This Executive Report provides seven factors that every executive should know about information destruction and three key strategies to improved information destruction. It also provides sample Records Management Procedures that may be customized for any size company or organization. PDF ONLY
The challenging economic environment – both in terms of pressures to cut costs and increasing workforce transformations – has put Human Resource (HR) departments in the corporate spotlight. Steadily increasing state, federal, and international workplace laws and privacy regulations are putting additional demands on HR professionals.
Control Station established a software escrow agreement with Iron Mountain in order to assure their distributors that access to their product would be maintained, even if something happened to the company. With this assurance in place, Control Station was well-positioned to pursue its long-term growth strategy.
USANA Health Sciences began its relationship with Iron Mountain in 2005 with Iron Mountain’s records management services. Iron Mountain approached USANA, offering to do an analysis of its current records management program while implementing a storage solution for USANA’s product retention samples. Iron Mountain currently provides offsite storage of USANA’s product retention samples in order to maintain evidence of proof of manufacturing for all of its nutrition supplements and personal care products. Iron Mountain keeps these products stored in a temperature-controlled environment, with humidity levels properly maintained, and delivers the necessary samples to USANA as needs arise.
With 83 mobile offshore drilling units and the largest “floating” rig driller in the industry, Transocean Inc. is the world’s largest offshore drilling company. Transocean excels at constructing oil and natural gas wells in deep waters and harsh environments. A Cayman Islands corporation, the company has approximately 11,600 employees worldwide.
Regional Medical Center (The Med) is a healthcare provider of efficient, quality healthcare for individuals throughout a five-state region within 150-miles of Memphis, Tennessee. Funded by government dollars from its base in Shelby County, The Med found itself pinched when new budget restrictions took hold — and its aging archive infrastructure kept racking up expenses.
Iron Mountain standardizes information destruction across more than 1,500 banking locations
A privately held company supporting more than 34,000 customer sites in over 40 countries, RedPrairie offers a wide range of software and services. Leading retailers trust RedPrairie solutions to deliver an increase in productivity — with the flexibility to adapt as business needs change.
The implementation of Iron Mountain’s escrow and Full Usability Verification services provides an operational safeguard for a company that is protecting the possessions and property of others, as well as demonstrating industry best practices.
Novant Health is a not-for-profit, integrated health system with 13 hospitals, 1,124 physicians and 355 clinic locations across the Southeast. To prepare for the implementation of its initial electronic medical record (EMR) solution within its physician clinics, the organization developed a strategy for scanning patient records using internal resources.
Data protection is critical insurance against loss of data that could cripple a business. It is estimated that three out of five businesses that experience downtime of 48 hours or more will be out of business within 3 years. Creating a successful disaster recovery and data protection plan requires people, process and technology in the right recipe to be successful. It is not easy work, but it is essential work.
Keeping two of the most populated counties of Florida safe is the critical work performed by the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit and its current State Attorney, Norman R. Wolfinger. The State Attorney works to protect the innocent, to prosecute crimes, and to promote the safety and well-being of the public, while seeking out justice.
The QBE Specialty Insurance group invested over $10 million in customized financial processing software. Protection for this software was a serious concern for the group’s Information Systems (IS) team.
Lahey Clinic leverages Iron Mountain Image on Demand™ solution to digitize paper-based records on an as-needed basis and quickly deliver the most important data to the point of care.
Discovery Escrow provides a secure and controlled environment that allows plaintiffs to access and examine the intellectual property in question, while eliminating the potential exposure and risk associated with defendants delivering that proprietary information directly to plaintiffs. Leveraging Iron Mountain’s extensive national footprint of secure data protection vaults, the Discovery Escrow Service is delivered at locations that are conveniently located and agreeable to both parties.
Our comprehensive D3P service is available for all types of electronic records, including COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk), back office, imaged, and transactional, as well as email and messaging communications. It offers compliance for an extraordinarily broad range of document management applications, including client-server to mainframe systems. Records can be stored in-house or offsite and on any type of WORM (Write Once, Read Many) media.
When disaster strikes you should be able to snap into action and get your company operating properly again. Having a disaster recovery plan is key and if you haven’t reviewed your plan to confirm it works, your organization may be in jeopardy. You need confidence that your plan will function as intended, keeping your information protected and getting you back up and running fast.
Enable your organization’s adoption of an electronic medical record (EMR) with: — Customizable imaging programs that help you scale back reliance on physical records and make a smooth migration to a fully digital workflow — Secure, compliant storage that maintains chain-of-custody throughout a record’s lifecycle — while protecting electronic information — Best-practice workflows and on-demand digital conversion that drive efficiencies and reduce costs
Healthcare providers are seeing exponential growth of digital information, from medical images to the Electronic Health Record (EHR). The volume alone has multiplied at incredible rates, while file sizes and the use of new modalities continue to grow. The combination has created a myriad of storage cost, protection and management challenges.
The challenge facing today’s Health Information Managers is straightforward: provide optimum levels of service while operating as cost-efficiently as possible. It's a critical challenge further complicated by the need to optimize record center space, ensure timely access to patient records, and comply with the growing number of health information regulations. In addition, as the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) accelerates, healthcare providers must prepare themselves to embrace the underlying technology and find new ways to integrate the EHR with their existing physical records management processes. Healthcare Information Professionals recognize EHR as one of the major challenges facing them over the next decade.
Are your information assets really delivering the value they should? Are you able to turn paper and digital records to maximum advantage? Or is this an area of opportunity — where better information management practices could help your business realize cost savings, improve efficiency and reduce risk?
Evidence shows that in today’s business environment, most companies take a reactive approach to information management — choosing to implement the proper measures only after an event has revealed a weakness and created the need for improvement.
Federal records are crucial to documenting U.S. history and providing future generations with an understanding of the government challenges and strategies that drive actions. Through the Presidential Memorandum for Managing Government Records, the Obama administration indicates that records management, by enabling participatory, transparent, and collaborative government, is the backbone of open government. This memorandum places an importance on the appropriate preservation of government records not seen since the Truman administration. The Presidential Memorandum for Managing Government Records instructs agencies to transition to electronic records as a feasible way to save taxpayer dollars, promote accountability, and increase transparency. However, even with the executive support required by the memorandum, agencies face challenges modernizing records management policies and practices, especially while preserving vital records. PDF ONLY
You store media offsite to protect your organization, but what happens if your records don’t match up with what’s actually in the vault? If you have unknown or unresolved discrepancies, your organization risks being unable to find information when it’s needed or to get back up and run in the event of a disaster. Plus, you’re wasting resources searching for media — time you cannot afford to lose in today’s “do more with less” business environment.
The Iron Mountain Secure Media Destruction service helps you establish a defensible, documented, and repeatable process to prepare, handle or transport, and destroy your electronic media either at your data center or at an offsite destruction facility.
Your organization operates in a world where hardware malfunctions, human errors, software corruption, and man-made or natural disasters are an ever-present threat to your data. And you’ve probably invested significantly in backing up your data should one of these incidents impact your operations — but that’s only one part of the story.
With greater emphasis on enhancing privacy and security, meeting compliance regulations and proving chain of custody, the rules of offsite tape storage practices are undergoing significant change. To meet these emerging demands, you have likely found the need to implement access policies that account for larger volumes of media and exercise greater control over the movement and storage of your tapes. And of course, you need to achieve these goals while ensuring that all processes are executed as efficiently as possible.
To help you realize the goal of more productive operations, we’ve compiled this list of things you can do to streamline your information management processes and promote efficiencies across your company.
On January 1, 2011, financial institutions and creditors in the United States were required to comply with a “Red Flags Rule” adopted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC or Commission) and the various regulators of the nation’s financial institutions. The Rule requires each of the affected businesses to develop and implement programs designed to detect, prevent and mitigate the effects of identity theft.
Inside, we’ll show you how to get more out of what you spend by helping you improve the efficiencies of your information management processes, allowing you to gain more strategic advantages.
With expertise developed over decades of experience in information management workflows and business processes across industries, Iron Mountain helps customers lower costs and trim expenses via unique and comprehensive solutions. Our solutions and services help companies refine information management processes for optimal cost efficiencies.
To help your company lower its risk profile and boost audit and litigation readiness, we've developed a list of the top five things you can do today to make your information management practices a key contributor to ongoing compliance.
To assist in your efforts to improve the bottom line, we’ve compiled a list of five best practices you can employ to significantly reduce the cost of information management.
Mission-critical technology is everywhere, and you depend on it every day. Failing to protect mission-critical technology puts your business at risk... you can’t afford not to safeguard your reliance on it.
Secure, Compliant, Cost-Effective, Environmentally Responsible Information Destruction
Iron Mountain® Document Management Solutions help you create a comprehensive, fully integrated document management program that gives you complete visibility and access to all your business records — where and when you need them. Our enhanced access and control can speed business processes and decision-making, improve customer service and support compliance requirements.
Inside, you’ll find exercises to help you identify and understand the different types of costs in your current processes, so you can better evaluate less expensive, more effective alternatives.
The volatile economic climate over the past few years has placed a heavy burden on IT organizations to cope with ever-growing infrastructures and data volumes, with little or no increase in personnel. Supporting a large data backup or archiving function can place considerable added strains on an already stretched IT staff. As a result, many organizations are embracing solutions that allow them to offload the burden of administering these functions within their environment, and instead focus their internal IT resources on areas that support their primary business. This has increased the popularity of both cloud-based solutions, as well as the use of managed services for information deemed too valuable or sensitive to store in the cloud.
Recent business scandals and new regulations demand greater focus on risk management and corporate controls. Total records management compliance is no longer optional - it's required. Can you be certain your records management program is legally-credible, current, and compliant? Is your organization at risk? In short, how does your records management program measure up?