Staying Ahead Of The Storm: The Role Of ECM In Disaster Preparedness

By David Smith, VP and General Manager, Xerox DocuShare

One important facet of this preparation is a plan for the fast recovery of organizational content - such as office productivity documents, e-mails, electronic and hard copy faxes, images, important URLs, and a variety of other paper and digital information – and the business-critical information it contains. Content is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise, integral not only to operational effectiveness but even to corporate viability. The reality is, without secure, reliable access to content, the majority of today's work simply stops.

Given that, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system has become an essential solution, offering businesses of all sizes a secure, easy-to-manage, and sharable repository that makes quick recovery of precious content possible should the unexpected occur.

Implementing an ECM solution as part of any business continuity and disaster readiness effort deserves the same level of risk assessment as any other operational process, so that the true impact of a disruption – the risk in not being able to get to business content such as regulatory policies, emergency guidelines, customer data or business records - is quantified. The challenge is to implement an ECM solution that balances best-in-class capabilities with affordability to accommodate other disaster readiness investments and deliver ROI.

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