World Backup Day aims to remind businesses and individuals to back up important data and files. It serves as a very important day in the calendar, as backing up, even just once a year, can help to save costs and prevent the risk associated with lost documents and files. This is supported by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC, which found that 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. With this in mind, backing up and saving your documents and files could save your business from future disaster.
According to Nitro, workers spend on average 50% of their time creating and preparing documents. If those files got lost or deleted, recreating them would come at a major expense to the organisation. Adding to this, businesses already spend on average $20,000 and lose over 21% in employee productivity on document issues.
Despite the cost and risk associated with lost documents, 60% of backups are incomplete and 50% of restores fail. Adding insult to injury, Egress Software Technologies has found that employees are the biggest risk to data loss incidents in the business world.
With this in mind, companies need to overcome the challenge of failed backups and accidental data loss by implementing document management solutions that will not only help to free up employee time and improve customer experiences but will also help a company to recover from a disaster quicker and easier.
The cost of lost documents
Data loss should be top of mind for all businesses, and rightfully so, as it has been reported that 60% of businesses shut down within six months of data loss. As such every business needs to have a continuity plan to recover from a malicious attack, hardware failure and even human error. This is where document management can help.
According to Cybersecurity Ventures, the world will have to store 200 zettabytes of data by 2025. While data creation is on the rise, searching through company files is estimated to cost companies almost $20K per worker, per year. On top of this Tech Crunchies estimates that employees spend approximately 18 minutes searching for a document while M-Files states that 83% of employees recreate existing documents that they can’t find on the company network. All of this contributes to productivity loss and increased costs for the company.
Reduced content clutter for improved brand consistency and compliance
A cloud-based document generation and management platform that is easily accessible using the technology solutions employees are accustomed to using daily, makes business sense. It also meets the requirement of 81% of employees who want to have access to company documents remotely[7]. This is particularly relevant and useful as many countries have implemented Covid-19 lockdown regulations and employees are trying to meet customer needs whether they are office-based or working remotely.
By implementing a sound document generation and management solution, not only does it improve employee efficiencies and save the company money on time wasted searching for and recreating documents, but also helps to ensure brand consistency and compliance across all templates and standard documents that the company uses to send to customers. This aids in delivering consistent brand experiences across the organisation, regardless of who sends the files and contributes to a positive working environment.
Document management gives employees peace of mind
Many organisations make the mistake of storing templates and documents together and yet they are not the same thing. For example, how many times have you asked for a template, only to be sent a document? One of the biggest issues employees face is that of colleagues accidentally overriding templates stored on a shared location. This results in lost employee productivity and unnecessary costs in retrieving or recreating these documents.
At the same time, while document generation and management are related, they are not the same thing. Brand-compliant templates and easily accessible content can save employees time and reduce the risk of overriding all-important templates. Having a document management system in place provides added peace of mind that no back-up solution can; after all a back-up solution cannot prevent human error.
While backing up is important, companies cannot rely on a single solution to address potential data loss risks, they need to implement a multilayer solution that prevents compliant documents from being overridden by human error as well as provide quick and easy access to important files and documents whether working on-site or remotely. By implementing solutions that provide additional internal security standards to prevent possible data hacks and breaches, companies will not only be backing up important documents, but will also be adding additional layers of security to prevent data loss.