Mountainous scanning operation

05 October 2011

Iron Mountain has opened one of Europe’s largest document scanning and indexing centres to help organisations across Europe protect, process and make the most of their information. The centre in Stafford expands Iron Mountain’s network of European imaging facilities to 56 in 19 countries.

Using the latest technology, the centre provides a suite of document management services for organisations of all sizes, from across all business sectors and European locations. With a production environment of just under 25,000 square feet, the centre can deliver up to 250 million documents per year at full capacity. Customer mail, including items such as invoices, application forms and HR files, comes directly to the site where it is sorted, prepared and digitised, with the required data pulled out and delivered in a format that is ready for customers to use in their systems. The strictest security features are built into the site, allowing Iron Mountain to process highly sensitive and confidential information. All the services provided are fully compliant with European national and international law.

“According to IDC, companies waste between five and 10 per cent of annual revenue on creating, sharing, searching for and protecting paper documents,” said Mark Duale, President of International at Iron Mountain. “This is because the use and distribution of paper documents is almost impossible to track. Filing them uses up valuable space and resources, and they can easily be lost or damaged. The case for scanning is therefore overwhelming, and many businesses are beginning to digitise their documents.”

For many organisations, the step to wholesale digitisation is daunting. Fears exist about information security and access, the impact on paper-based business processes, compatibility with paper and electronic archives and the minefield of rapidly changing national and European regulation.

Services provided by the new centre include logistics (secure document collection and delivery); intelligent scanning; information extraction, indexing and validation; secure storage; rapid data retrieval (for example for legal disclosure or auditing purposes); and end-of-life, legally compliant shredding or destruction.