Ease your worries and relax a little. The Service Uptime Guarantee will be one of the key features of your SaaS platform. This is an important factor when choosing the right document management vendor for your organization.
Your SaaS document management software should be guaranteed to be operational 99.9% of the time in any calendar month. What does that 0.1% mean? It means that the service can only have 45 minutes of unplanned downtime outside of the normal scheduled maintenance window. It also means that your vendor is committed to ensuring that the service is available since the down time impacts their bottom line.
With the 99.9% guarantee, your SaaS vendor will monitor the system 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. No more worries or concerns that your server will go down, and your employees are unable to do their jobs. No more pagers for the on-call IT staff. You no longer have to worry about hardware failures like disk drives, network cards or tape systems. You can also forget about all those server OS patches and database patches, your vendor must do them. This guarantee allows you to have maximized business efficiency.
When it comes to in-house security, there are endless measures to take in order to prepare for a disaster or a computer environment threat:
On-premise or license-based document management systems require up-front capital expenditures on the software licenses and the hardware required to run the software. Purchasing servers require waiting for the hardware to arrive, and who knows, this could take weeks!
Credit Unions, unlike banks, are not-for-profit financial service organizations. That's something we all know. However, "not-for-profit" does not mean that they receive funding in the form of donations. Credit Unions must be self-sustaining; hence, they need to watch their bottom line.
Just like the cowardly lion, your paperwork can be helpful; you just have to treat it right.
Make it EASY for your staff to find your documents and information. If you manage a non-profit, dealing with the paperwork can sometimes make you feel like you are walking through a forest with Dorothy. There are volunteer liability release forms, vendor contracts, donor records, operations information and tax documents you need to retain for compliance. Trying to find an easy way to manage all that information does not have to be so challenging.
There is a great quote by Peter F. Drucker that says, “ Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.” You probably know that there is a better way to manage your paper, but maybe you haven't found a solution that resolves all of the issues just yet. Here are a few ideas that may help you get more organized:
- When a volunteer completes a liability release form, scan the document and immediately create an electronic file using document management software that will store it by name, date, category etc. in an easy-to-use system.
- Need to have a quick way to look up what a donor contributed to your organization before making that follow-up phone call? If you store information electronically in a document management system, you can quickly access anything related to the donor by searching your records using only the donors name in your search.
- Want to make sure your documents are automatically retained for the legal required amount of time? Use the same solution for your records retention needs and it will alert you when retention dates have expired so you can easily dispose of any unnecessary documents that may clutter your system or increase your risk of audit and potential litigation.
- Have vendor service-provider contracts that need to be reviewed by multiple people in your organization, and signed by individuals outside of your office? An online document management system with version control and e-signature capabilities can help you automate the entire business process.
- When your volunteers or service-providers are working off-site collecting information for you, instead of having them mail, drop-off, or fax paperwork to your office, allow them the flexibility to upload a document into an online document storage system that they can access from the internet. That way you save on postage, time, and your forms are automatically stored in your secure electronic system.
Since businesses' growth opportunities aren't quite at their peak right now (to say the very least), many executive managers are spending more time and attention on internal processes. Many organizations have become more involved in disaster recovery (DR) strategies and DR budgeting initiatives for the remainder of this year and for 2010.
Your company has already suffered from budget cuts, and you have transitioned a portion of your employees to "virtual" home offices. The LAST thing you need is to feel insecure about where your business files and information are as they leave the company network...
So how do you protect your valuable documents with remote workers? Here's a checklist with the most important aspects to consider when looking for an affordable and secure solution for information access and file storage:
The White House's initiative to provide a source to facilitate easy identification and purchase of cloud services by government agencies is now available using the Apps.Gov portal.
The cloud initiative's goal is to modernize Information Technology (IT) by identifying enterprise-wide common services and solutions and adopting a new cloud-computing business model.
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