Securing and Streamlining Your Organization’s Biggest Asset

Information is the biggest asset in any organization. The efficiency with which businesses manage this information in terms of storing, searching, retrieving, and protecting it is critical to the success of the business. September 11 highlighted new threats to businesses and revealed that the approach to the long-term storage and protection of information must be reassessed. The outright destruction of paper records and offices, as well as substantial denial of access to buildings (whether due to proximity to the World Trade Center, or due to biological contamination), illustrates the need to have electronic copies of documentation available from disaster-proof archives.

To this end, document-intensive businesses—including government, financial services, medical, insurance, legal, human resources, accounting, geographic information systems, and real estate, as well as application service providers—are looking for new solutions for safe, remote storage and efficient retrieval of documents.

Using the full power of the Web, NetVue allows for the secure viewing and annotating of copies of paper or electronic documents by customers, employees, or the public, while maintaining control, source integrity, and cost-effectiveness. The ability to view documents and images in over 100 formats without having to install the native application on the client’s workstation shortens the document processing cycle time. It also improves customer relations and internal communications by providing an effective way to give customers direct access to their account files, in a read-only mode, providing self-service interaction.

Iron Mountain, the leader in records and information management, stores and manages millions of cubic feet of business records for thousands of businesses, including more than half of the Fortune 500. Iron Mountain has developed a range of Image Archiving Services within their Digital Archives Division. For scanned documents or documents that are already in electronic form—such as patient records or monthly statements from utilities or credit card companies—Iron Mountain maintains a Digital Archiving service. This service provides for the preservation and security of the information while giving access to users via a secure, Web-based solution that utilizes NetVue technology. Imaged documents are viewable through a Web interface, regardless of initial format. For documents that are paper-based, Iron Mountain offers an innovative “Image on Demand” service which involves retrieving a document from a box, scanning it to the Web, and placing a link to the scanned document in the customer’s inbox. The benefits of image-based delivery are enormous.

Chris Schwarzer, principal engineer for imaging solutions at Iron Mountain, explains: “We dramatically reduce the time to deliver the document to an office in downtown Manhattan or a remote branch in Minnesota. The source document never leaves our secure data center, so it can’t get lost or slow down other workers who need access to it. We relieve the user from the responsibility of shipping the document back to the storage facility. Banks, health networks, and government agencies can now offer much faster services to their customers.

“Now we can provide our customers with timely access to the information contained in their documents while maintaining the security of the original document. Breaking multi-page documents into single page files is a huge benefit to us. Instead of having to wait to download an entire document, NetVue’s Document Streaming (NDS) allows fast delivery of the first page of the document and the thumbnails, and cuts down enormously on network traffic.”

What Are the Benefits of NetVue Document Streaming?

• It’s fast—up to 20 times faster than the closest available alternative.;

• It minimizes network traffic substantially. Many customers want to scan the first few pages of a document to determine if it is the desired one. By eliminating the need to download the entire document before the first page can be read, these users consume on average only 1/10th of the bandwidth of users who have to download entire documents.;

• The system administrator and individual users can control the type of streaming used.;

• It’s secure. NDS images are intrinsically secure as the data protocol is not reversible.;

Iron Mountain is delivering what Bill Gates promised years ago—”information at your fingertips” and access to information “anywhere, anytime, on any device.” NetVue’s browser-based document portal and the speed of NDS are integral parts of what makes it possible.

---

Founded in 1985, AccuSoft Corporation develops and markets a line of high-performance imaging and document delivery solutions. To learn more about NetVue and other AccuSoft products, visit our Web site at: AccuSoft