KNOW THE LEGAL REPERCUSSIONS

There is no doubt that one of your company’s valuable assets is your costumer’s data which often contains confidential and valuable information. While electronically stored information (ESI) is most often an asset, it can also be a liability when not handled properly. The Data Privacy Act, most specifically Retention Policy exists to prevent or at least discourage abuse of said data. It particularly states that retention of personal data shall only for as long as necessary: (a) for the fulfillment of the declared, specified, and legitimate purpose, or when the processing relevant to the purpose has been terminated; (b) for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims; or (c) for legitimate business purposes, which must be consistent with standards followed by the applicable industry or approved by an appropriate government agency.

Failing to comply with this law often leads to disputes and even lawsuits which would then lead to a tampered reputation and a decrease in your client/customer’s confidence in your company. Now you might be asking, how do you prevent this from happening? How do you ensure that you and your company are in compliance with the law?

PROBLEM SOLVED: DOCUMENTUM

A secured document management system like Infobuilder’s Documentum Retention Policy Services could save you hours, days, and even months of time. First and foremost, it can organize your documents while complying with the Retention Policy. It is automated, user-friendly, and easily configured to meet business and compliance goals. Laws and policies can easily and automatically be applied and enforced at the platform level across all content types, enterprise-wide without needing any action from you or your employees. This means saying goodbye to manually purging and organizing your documents. With Documentum RPS, you can bring content under control and into compliance, mitigating your organization’s risk, and reducing storage, and discovery costs.

How does it work? It’s easy. With predefined features, you can set the termination of every document upon entering them in the system. If there are multiple documents with related retention policies, all you need to do is create a folder and apply the said policy. Doing that applies the policy to every document in that folder. Incoming documents that have the same policy could easily be placed on the folder and the policy would automatically apply to the document.

In some cases, files would need to be on hold. For example, an ongoing legal matter. With this, what you need to do is what RPS refers to as a “markup,” meaning that the retention policy will be placed on hold until the markup is removed. Lastly and considerably the most important part is Disposition. When the retention period has lapsed, there are multiple ways on how to handle the file depending on the needed action. Such ways are (1) Review; (2) Export all, Destroy all; (3) Destroy all; (4) Export all; (5) Export all, Destroy content; (6) Destroy content; and (7) Unknown. If the strategy includes a review, then the authorized user will use the Disposition Manager to review and select the appropriate action.

It’s easy, isn’t it? Now, you and your employees don’t need to manually keep track of each client/customer’s document/s for disposal. You can also be assured that the process is secured and no one would have access to the files anymore. So you can breathe, just relax, and use the time that you now have for other important things.