Tips for Choosing Commercial Storage Facility
Posted on: 19 November 2015
Businesses and companies that deal with a lot of paperwork find it piling up after a short period of time. After a few years, the amount of storage available within the institution becomes too small to accommodate the growing pile of documents. This makes it necessary to outsource storage facilities elsewhere. There are many companies that provide commercial document storage facilities for businesses and other entities.
Benefits of commercial storage
There are various benefits that are attributed to hiring commercial storage. They include the following.
- Commercial storage facilities provide maximum security for your documents. This includes use of high security unit locks, fire-resistant units, security cameras, gated access and alarmed units. This makes them a good choice for storage of confidential documents that may be accessed by unauthorized persons back at the business premises.
- They facilitate records management where one is able to track the people who retrieve documents from the facility through the use of barcode tracking system. This provides accountability in case a document goes missing.
- Commercial storage facilities offer a wide variety of services other than storage. These include documents retrieval, scanning, records destruction, media scanning and media destruction. The types of services offered depend on the facility.
- Storing your documents off-site frees up space within the business premises that can be used for other business related purposes. Most businesses dedicated a lot of space to storage which could be used for other purposes.
When choosing a commercial documents storage facility, the following considerations are important.
Size of storage units
You will need a storage facility whose storage units are able to accommodate the current and future documents that will be generated. It should also be flexible enough to accommodate new documents as they come. If your business is large and generates a lot of paperwork, consider a big facility that will serve you for the coming years as well.
Facility location
This factor is important if you will be occasionally referring to and retrieving archived documents. If so, the facility should be within close proximity to your business. This will help reduce transport and other costs that could be incurred in the process of retrieving and returning documents and media. If archived documents are not frequently used, location of the facility will not be a major factor.
Document protection features
Storage units need to be designed to preserve your documents without molding or getting damaged due to moisture. Consider a facility with climate controlled units for better storage and preservation of your documents from moisture and sunlight.
Ease of accessibility
Consider the accessibility logistics put in place by the facility. Do they allow 24 hour access to documents? Which categories of people from your organization will be allowed to access documents? The bottom line is to get a storage facility that will not inconvenience you when you need to access your documents.
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