Learning about the advantages of digital archiving
As an experienced and professional archiving company, the Microform team are well aware of the advantages of digital archiving services.
These go beyond just backing up hardcopy data as electronic files, and in fact, when taken together, the many different advantages of digital archiving add up to much more than just the sum of their parts.
Here are five of the biggest benefits of digital archiving services, which just grow and grow with the size and number of documents you want to digitise.
Fast and easy
Outsourced digital archiving services mean you don't need to worry about the time and effort it takes to archive your documents.
But by working with a professional digital archiving service provider like Microform, you can rest assured that your complete document stack will be digitised to a high standard with minimal delay.
Our cutting-edge document scanning equipment and expertise allow for a high throughput of pages, so if you need a digital backup of a large archive of printed documents, we can have it finished sooner than you might expect.
Flexible formats
Unlike some digital archiving service providers, at Microform we don't just give you a folder full of unsorted, uncompressed image files.
Instead, you get a sensible, logical digital document archive, with pages saved in the appropriate format, including:
uncompressed photographic images
compressed or monochrome image files
sharable and searchable PDFs
editable plain text documents
numerical and tabular data formats
Whatever data you want to digitise, we will work with you to create a bespoke plan involving file formats that are suitable for the data and that you can work with too.
Filesize minimisation
Datacentres place increasing demands on a number of key resources, including power supplies, physical real estate for server hardware, and also server space in terms of gigabytes of storage used.
When you use professional document archiving services like Microform's, we can work to minimise the total file size of your archived documents.
That means compressing images where it is appropriate to do so, as well as converting plain text documents to digital text, which takes up far less disk space than a photographic scan of the same page.
Nothing will be compressed if you need the scan to be an uncompressed photographic file, for example, a TIFF, but in many cases, it is completely appropriate to apply an acceptable level of compression and make files much smaller to store and faster to download.
Secure storage
Digitised document archives are naturally much easier to store - what previously took up an entire room can fit on to one small disk.
Cloud document storage and optional offsite backup means these documents can be duplicated without putting security at risk.
In the event of a future disaster or business interruption, your critical files are there waiting for you at your secondary location, allowing seamless continuity and without putting regulatory compliance under threat.
Searchable and editable
We've already mentioned it above, but it's hard to overstate the benefit of making fixed physical documents into a searchable and editable digital archive.
It may not be appropriate to allow editing — again that's completely fine if not, as even plain text can be stored in an uneditable, but still searchable and sharable, PDF format.
But by digitising large document stores as searchable, editable text, you can massively increase the dynamism of your company's records-keeping operation.
With the ability to choose sensible folder structures, filenames and add metadata to scanned images too, even photographic content can be made searchable and much easier to find, enhancing retrieval and improving compliance with regulatory demands.
If you want to know more about digital archiving, or how Microform could help your business, get in touch today.