Inventory Governance: More an Audit by Michelle Doyle

You've seen it all over the news: companies left and right, including giants like Target and Home Depot, have been victims of data breaches. Because this has become so commonplace you may have heard of the term personally identifiable information or PII for short. PII is information that can be used on its own or with other information to identify, contact, or locate a single person, or to identify an individual in context. And clearly we've seen the disaster that happens when non-public personal information is not protected and gets into the wrong hands.

In addition to making sure your sensitive information is protected, you may even be required to audit that your information stored offsite is where you say it is, especially if you store personally identifiable information. But it's not enough to just audit information, because although important, auditing only checks that your information is where you say it is when it's already been sent offsite. According to the 2014 PwC and Iron Mountain Information Risk Maturity Index, only 36 percent of European and 28 percent of North American businesses effectively monitor their information management processes for the safe security, storage and disposal of confidential information. As you are creating and storing private information offsite every day, you also need ways to prevent any issues before they happen and fix any issues that have already happened.

Iron Mountain has created a solution that addresses your needs head-on: the Inventory Governance solution. This solution includes services to help do two key things for the information you store offsite: know what it is and show where it is. You'll be able to prevent and remediate inventory issues by attaching metadata to newly created and legacy information and you can rely on options for inventory audits so you can prove control over where your information is being stored.

And a bonus! To make information audits even easier, early next year Iron Mountain will be the first and only information management company offering radio frequency identification (RFID)-ready boxes to you. Our most popular box types will come RFID-ready, meaning they will come with a label containing an RFID chip pre-associated with a barcode and pre-applied to your box, making the path to complete inventory governance easier at no additional charge. This means you will automatically be set up for an easier audit, with the latest asset tracking technology built into your box, eliminating the need to purchase and apply the labels yourself. We'll be showcasing prototypes of our new RFID-ready boxes at the ARMA conference later this week. If you're going to ARMA, be sure to stop by our booth #1119!

Check out our Inventory Governance solution webpage for more information about services to help you gain complete governance over your physical records inventory and stay tuned to our storage boxes webpage for more information about RFID-ready boxes!

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/service-lines/records-management-an...
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