Businesses in Gibraltar, and around the world, are under increasing pressure to meet regulatory and compliance standards concerning business ethics and procedures. One area that can create problems for many types of business, large or small, is the ever-growing need for space.

Here in Gibraltar space is a valuable commodity. As businesses grow and develop, depending of the nature of the individual business, two things are likely to happen: an expansion of the work force and the ever-increasing amount of paper that these individuals produce.

Moving premises or extending existing ones can be stressful and costly as well as inconvenient. Of course, moving to new premises can also be a sign of prosperity and business development, but wherever we go, no matter how much space we acquire it will inevitably one day be filled.

Sound management protocols should allow a business to manage the ever-growing amounts of paper and data produced, and fulfil the required compliant and regulatory duties as one and the same. However, meeting these requirements can add stress and consume time that could be spent concentrating on the business in hand.

From the aspect of compliance a couple of phrases that are used, so much these days, are disaster recovery and continuity planning. When these phrases are used people instantly think of calamities such as earthquake or floods. However a disaster often takes the form of something quite different and may only affect individual businesses rather than whole districts. A business could cease operations for any number of reasons, natural disaster being just one of them. It could be that a man made error, denial of access to your premises, loss of data because of hardware failure or fire.

The priority is to restore services and restart operations as soon as possible. Statistics from the London Resilience website show that half the companies that suffer from either data loss or major disruption and have no effective continuity planning, go out of business within twelve months of the event.

Outsourcing document management/archives as well
as digital data is something that can make life easier and at the same time increase the effectiveness of disaster recovery and continuity plans.

Lab Gibraltar Ltd. provides a number of solutions that are both cost-effective and compliant. By removing digital data storage away from your place of business you automatically create a duplicate that is constantly updated. Lab’s dedicated Data Vault backup solution means that a client’s entire system can be restored without the danger of corrupted or lost data often associated with backup tapes. Data Vault allows for full backup restoration or even the restoration of individual files, should a file be misplaced or accidentally deleted. The backup data is encrypted before leaving the client’s premises for additional security.

Lab can also provide clients with a managed Document Vault. Storing your physical documents/archive in our secure premises that are monitored by intruder alarm, fire detection and entrance and exit monitored CCTVs. The Vault Is temperature and humidity controlled to ensure documents do not deteriorate over time and they are also catalogued for ease of access and retrieval should originals be required by the client.

Some clients require documents to be scanned and transferred to other types of media or hosted by Lab for online viewing. Closed circuit networks are used for the scanning process removing the threat posed by outside attack.