A warm welcome from The Sterling Data Group Team

Today (27/11/2009), The Sterling Data group has launched this new website. Replacing the two rather outdated sterlingarchives.com & sterlingsafefile.com sites by incorporating them into one new and fresh design.

We have also today launched our online support site featuring a knowledgebase, remote support and much much more. Please see the links at the top of the page to register for access to the support area.

Furthermore, with the development of RS-WEB, our Online Archive Management System, we look forward to working with our customer both old and new in developing solutions that can be implemented across their organisations. With web management and a single, online database managing, maintaining and viewing your records has never been easier.

Please watch this space for further exciting developments…

About Sterling

The Sterling Data Group is leading the way with data management services. It is our mission to protect our client’s information while assisting clients with compliance and in areas of regulation. After all, Our Business is Your Peace of Mind. Information owned by your business will be in various formats, varying in importance with various retention requirements.

Sterling offer records management – both on and off site, electronic data management in the form of encrypted online backup and recovery services, backup media management services, disaster recovery support and the secure destruction of data. Working with Sterling will enable you to drive down costs, manage the risks associated with data management, retrieval and retention while becoming compliant with regulatory bodies relevant to your business.

The Sterling Data Group is proud to announce being selected for continued service delivery to Inverness Medical. To date Sterling has provided archive management services to Inverness Medical (formally Unipath), however due to major restructuring and the relocation of their head office the document management requirements were reviewed.

Inverness Medical realised a requirement for document scanning as well as document archiving. Sterling put together a proposal, working closely with Stortext (our bureau scanning partner) and were successful in our joint bid. Work is in the planning stages with production due to begin in early December.

For more information on bureau scanning, please visit www.stortext.com.

About Sterling

The Sterling Data Group is leading the way with data management services. It is our mission to protect our client’s information while assisting clients with compliance and in areas of regulation. After all, Our Business is Your Peace of Mind. Information owned by your business will be in various formats, varying in importance with various retention requirements.

Sterling offer records management – both on and off site, electronic data management in the form of encrypted online backup and recovery services, backup media management services, disaster recovery support and the secure destruction of data. Working with Sterling will enable you to drive down costs, manage the risks associated with data management, retrieval and retention while becoming compliant with regulatory bodies relevant to your business.

As it can be seen from the photographs, the building and contents are a total loss. Unfortunately, the data on the computer systems within the building has been lost. We were invited along as the Managing Director, who had been considering the use of our Online Backup & Recovery service felt that it is important to highlight to others that the risks really are there.

“We have recently been looking at the issues surrounding protecting out data. While we did not have a great deal of data, what we did have was very important. We now have no customer records, accounting and payroll data and all of our paper based records are lost. To think that for a small monthly fee all of our computer data would have been safe is dreadful. We have been caught out by the ‘it will never happen to us’ syndrome, well we were very wrong”

For a cost of between £20 – £30 per month, this company would be in a position to download the lost data to new computers as soon as they have arrived at their temporary site. Thankfully, it is felt in this case that due to the nature of the business a full recovery (of the business, not the data) can be made, although this would have been more straight-forward if the data was still available.

This is just one of many cases where people feel that it simply will never happen to them. Unfortunately, in our line of business we see this kind of incident all to often, thankfully not always on a scale such as this. We therefore urge you to act now to ensure that your critical business data is protected.

About Sterling

The Sterling Data Group is leading the way with data management services. It is our mission to protect our client’s information while assisting clients with compliance and in areas of regulation. After all, Our Business is Your Peace of Mind. Information owned by your business will be in various formats, varying in importance with various retention requirements.

Sterling offer records management – both on and off site, electronic data management in the form of encrypted online backup and recovery services, backup media management services, disaster recovery support and the secure destruction of data. Working with Sterling will enable you to drive down costs, manage the risks associated with data management, retrieval and retention while becoming compliant with regulatory bodies relevant to your business.

Records, either paper documents or electronic files, are the evidence of what your business has done, for whom, when and for what reasons. Created by multiple systems and by different staff, your records are used to prove to customers that you have done what was agreed to the required standard and in the required time.

Records also form the financial proof of the existence of your business. They may be required as evidence to Government Departments, Industry Regulators and many other bodies both public and private. They should therefore be managed and retained in a specific manner, depending on the type of record.

Keeping records, for any of the reasons mentioned above or for any other reason, fast and accurate access to the information and evidence is required. If you cannot find the required records, you will waste valuable staff time and may find yourself in breach of regulations and/or contracts.

So what are the risks? Failure to implement a structured and controlled system for managing your records can lead to complications, litigation, loss of customer’s loss of quality and loss of business. Staff will waste time searching for mislaid records, blame for the loss of documents can be misplaced leading to ill feeling. The inability to prove you have done what was agreed, on time to the agreed standard.

The benefits of good records management is the cornerstone of any retention / storage policy. It will reduce cost of storage by reducing the total quantity to be stored and by saving staff time when records are required. In fact the cost of implementing a management system will usually be recovered from the savings to be made.

We can apply these principles to backfile issues, there is no limit to the quantity of records that can have their retention criteria checked. So long as they are identifiable in a database we can apply rules that can result in a significant reduction in the amount of records that require further retention.

Sterling Archives offer a free of charge consultancy service to help you establish the best way to manage your records & data security. In addition to this, we have a solution for every aspect of records management.

About Sterling

The Sterling Data Group is leading the way with data management services. It is our mission to protect our client’s information while assisting clients with compliance and in areas of regulation. After all, Our Business is Your Peace of Mind. Information owned by your business will be in various formats, varying in importance with various retention requirements.

Sterling offer records management – both on and off site, electronic data management in the form of encrypted online backup and recovery services, backup media management services, disaster recovery support and the secure destruction of data. Working with Sterling will enable you to drive down costs, manage the risks associated with data management, retrieval and retention while becoming compliant with regulatory bodies relevant to your business.