Archival Scanning - A Lifeboat in the Digital Storm

Have you looked at the forecast lately?

The future is in the cloud and it’s raining data! In fact, mankind entered the Zettabyte Era in 2012 when the amount of digital data worldwide exceeded one zettabyte for the very first time. Exactly how big is a zettabyte? It’s equal to a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. For reference, the average phone has about of 64 gigs of storage – barely a molecule of water in the zettabyte cloud.

Cybersecurity experts estimate that the total global amount of data stored in the cloud will reach 100 zettabytes by 2025 – double what it was just 10
years prior in 2015. If those numbers have you reaching for your umbrella to keep your file room dry, take heart! Archival scanning may be just the lifeboat for you.

What is archival scanning? Archival scanning takes hard copies of paper records, x-rays, books, and other physical media and converts them into a digital format, such as PDF, JPEG, and TIFF. The electronic files are then indexed and saved to the cloud, a document management system, or other digital storage media.

Why bother converting physical records into digital format? There’s a downpour of reasons, but they all boil down to saving you money. Firstly, having documents stored in the cloud reduces physical storage and retrieval costs. Additionally, your records can be accessed by anyone with permission, at any time, from any location in the world. Digital logging of that access also means that you have an audit trail of who viewed what when, increasing security of sensitive and confidential information. Digitization of records protects them in case of disasters such as fire, flood, human error or theft. Finally, going digital may help your company meet state and federal requirements specific to your industry.

So you’re ready to dip your toe in the water, what now? First, you need a reliable, experienced partner. At Opveon, we’ve helped companies large and small integrate into the Zettabyte Era. First, we’ll learn about your business and what’s important to you. Our experienced professionals can assist with organization of your physical materials prior to digitization. We then develop logical standardized naming conventions that will allow you to find what you need, fast. If you need more than just data storage, we can integrate your old and new records into a document management system.

Finally, we provide destruction of physical materials following digitization. Let us help you dance between the raindrops! Email us at info@opveon.com or call us at 918-359-8900 to start the process.