Think outside the box: overcome your hesitation to destroy physical records

Published On August 05, 2021

For decades we’ve been avoiding the inevitable - passing on the responsibility to others to make decisions about the destruction of legacy records that have met their retention requirements.  And as the years roll by, those decisions get even harder to make as employees and systems come and go, further complicated by inevitable organizational change, including merger and acquisition activity.

There are plenty of reasons for our hesitation to declare a record, file or box of records as eligible for destruction: uncertainty about authority to do so, potential discoverability for litigation and, more recently, hidden value for use in analytics. But, I believe there is a more fundamental barrier - the time, energy and resources it can take to sort out years of co-mingled or insufficiently identified records.

Now is the time to think outside the box and remove the ever-present risk associated with over-retention of your records. Do you have information about your paper records in a database or business management system? Do you have a records retention schedule? If you answered yes to both, then Iron Mountain’s Smart Sort solution is your opportunity to finally put order to your records inventory, however it is stored and wherever it is located.

With Iron Mountain Smart Sort, you can accelerate the destruction of paper records and enable a more compliant, efficient and defensible records management program. 

Our trained records management team uses input from your organization’s database and records retention schedule to survey your inventory and identify destruction eligibility at the file level. Then we reorganize your records according to destruction eligibility year so that you can confidently destroy information according to policy. 

So why wait to put order to chaos once and for all? Allow Smart Sort to give you the confidence to make the decisions necessary to finally bust through our “keep everything” culture.    

To learn more visit: ironmountain.com/smartsort