Records Storage

Many businesses, organizations, and government agencies rely on data to function properly—financial information, customer data, legal files—yet the safe storage of data records is an often an overlooked process.  The vast majority of records are stored as paper files or magnetic storage media, both of which are highly susceptible to fire.  If data is critical to fulfilling your firm’s mission, then insuring the safe storage and retrieval of records is vital to the continued productivity and profitability of your firm.

Despite the low occurrence of fires in records storage facilities, whether a vault, a file room, an archival storage facility, or a records center high-bay warehouse, the fires that do occur have devastating results for the firms and organizations that lose data.   

While many records storage facilities rely on sprinklers as their only fire protection, a risk assessment reveals:

• Sprinklers are designed to (and are very effective at) protecting the building structure, but not your assets.
• Sprinklers need significant heat to operate, requiring a full flaming fire, destroying assets (i.e. the stored records) at the source of the fire.
• Assets surrounding the fire suffer collateral damage from water and smoke, with smoke contamination often destroying electronic media quite a distance away from the incident.
• The loss of records, whether used for historical analysis, strategic planning, or legal purposes, can pose a financial burden on an organization, from increased liability to missed business opportunities.
• Electronic data records can often be recreated, but often at significant, and sometimes prohibitive, expense.