Nick Pantlin & Miriam Shears report on managing documents in the clouds
A few years ago, a number of high profile cases demonstrated in stark terms that a failure to manage documents properly can have far reaching and serious consequences. Perhaps most famously, Arthur Anderson, then one of the world’s largest accountancy firms, collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2002 after being accused of destroying documents in response to an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into its client, Enron. Cases such as this one resulted in a new commercial focus being placed upon issues such as document retention and document management.
The concept of “document retention” often still conjures up an image of mountains of archive boxes with hard copy documents. The reality, of course, has changed enormously, even since the time of Arthur Anderson’s collapse in 2002. “Documents” now comprise a broad array of media formats, including audio and visual media, hard drives, back-up tapes and mobile phone and Smartphone SIM cards. The storage of documents has also moved largely to
