Every company, no matter how big or small or in which area it operates, produces and manages sensitive information. This can be personal data of employees or customers that is protected by the Federal Data Protection Act or also business related information like sales statistics, business development information or correspondence.

The demands of society in total for the protection of data and information are continuously increasing. In the past few years especially internet data protection has been focussed on by the public. But also and especially the physical backup of files and records or discarded machine-readable data carriers are fundamental basic elements within a comprehensive data protection concept.

One trend is obvious:

The days of large paper archives are irreversibly gone. In most areas paper as a long-term storage medium is a thing of the past. Practically all present business transactions are originally created digitally and are stored and managed accordingly. But every organisation/company receives large amounts of analogue paper documents from external sources like customers, suppliers or employees. These can be invoices, enquiries, delivery notes, prescriptions, receipts etc. In the past the external documents were distributed to the relevant departments, maybe copied and after being processed physically filed in an archive. After the specified retention period these documents were disposed of.

Meanwhile so-called “digital mailrooms” have been established where paper documents are transformed into digital data by a scanner and these are integrated into the company’s digital workflow. The destruction of these documents takes place immediately after they have been digitised and not after 6 to 10 years in the archives.

This procedure ensures that the destruction of documents is always up-to date. Due to this up-to-datedness even relatively unimportant information has an increased need for protection.

Example:

A brand-name manufacturer’s purchasing conditions for one of the large trading groups that were valid in 1999 are not really of any interest after 10 years – however, last month’s conditions could be dynamite…