Iron Mountain now provides a document management solution for Human Resource departments, enabling them to drive down costs and quickly access HR records in both paper and digital formats

London, UK, March 26, 2009 - Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM), the global leader in information protection and storage services, today announced the introduction of a comprehensive document management solution designed for Human Resource (HR) departments. Iron Mountain thus provides a vertical Document Management Solution that covers the entire document lifecycle from acquisition to destruction.

Iron Mountain’s Document Management Solutions meet the needs of small and medium sized enterprises as well as large enterprises. The solutions cover the entire lifecycle of active files and combine physical storage, imaging and digital storage of documents. These comprehensive, integrated solutions also enable organisations to better manage their disaster recovery and business continuity plans without any additional investment.

HR document management operational challenges
Human resource documents contain some of an organisation’s most sensitive information, making storage and access both important and challenging. When HR tasks are managed by multiple offices or when the HR manager covers several geographical areas—both nationwide and internationally— timely access to widely dispersed information is difficult.

With Iron Mountain’s Digital Record Center™ hosting platform, multiple users can simultaneously retrieve their stored documents at any time from a Web browser, and depending on their access privileges, can preview document thumbnails, zoom in and out, rotate images, and download, print and forward files via highly efficient streaming technology.

Iron Mountain’s Document Management Solutions empower HR department staff with access anytime, anywhere to employee records. Off-site storage of HR documents drives down real-estate costs and enables a rigorous chain of custody with documents stored securely. 

The three specific challenges addressed

HR departments face three typical challenges related to document management, including providing secure access to information, ensuring information compliance, and controlling storage costs.

• Whether in paper or digital format, HR records must be accessed both easily and in a controlled manner, as field employees and central management often require access to the same documents for audit and review. Having different people accessing those documents may result in problems or inefficiencies in duplication, mailing and faxing, and raise the risk of inadvertent disclosures and/or lost documents. If master files needed for auditing and reporting are hard to access, users will make unauthorised convenience or “phantom” copies. Even when controlled, multiple copies can compromise the integrity of the employee records.
• In addition, HR departments are faced with the challenge of complying with the country-specific laws. The Employment Practices Data Protection Code under UK law, for example, recommends that employee records should not be kept beyond the standard retention time unless there is a business justification for doing so.  In addition, the Data Protection Act regulates the holding and processing of personal data held either in manual or digital format. The legislation promotes the legitimate, lawful and fair processing of personal information. Failure to comply can lead to fines and litigation from current and former employees.
• Also, depending on their size, organisations create and store hundreds or even thousands of records daily. Maintaining on-site file rooms, especially at corporate headquarters, requires a significant investment in real-estate and personnel.