Planning for the unexpected makes good business sense. A well thought out Business Continuity Plan (BCP) will help your business prepare for whatever contingency that may come your way. Regardless if it’s a storm, fire or pandemic, preparing your BCP when times are good will assist your business quickly get back on its feet whilst you may not be able to access your offices and or files.

This means planning for flexibility and agility particularly in how your team can access their systems and information to assist the business recovery. If your operations still rely on information stored on physical media, then this may already be a disadvantage.

Apart from paper, microfilm and microfiche has been a preferred archival media before desktop computers became accessible to most organisations. Microfiche and microfilm are able to store multiple pages in miniaturised-form. This made the media an ideal choice for Architectural offices, Government departments, Councils, Libraries, Hospitals, Schools, Financial Service providers, engineering firms and other businesses that generated numerous paper records.

However, if these materials were to become compromised, they essentially have all the disadvantages inherent with physical media. Apart from being susceptible to fire or flood, the fact of the matter is if your team is unable to retrieve the information in the event your offices are inaccessible, then your company and staff may face some avoidable challenges.

The best strategy for your business would be to engage with a microfilm and microfiche professional scanning service to convert your physical archives into an electronic format. Digitising your physical files should be an integral part for your long term planning and specifically your BCP.

Converting microfiche and microfilm to PDF format will make it easier to ensure your team has access to archival information regardless of what happens to your physical office. The fact that you can inexpensively store backup copies of your archives either on-site, offsite, or in the cloud will also help preserve them in case of disaster.