Headlines Provide Reminders on the Importance of Disaster Recovery Planning

By Bob Lund

Speaking Wednesday on ABC TV's Good Morning America, Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said, "We don't always get to pick the next disaster."

Fugate was referring, of course, to the magnitude 5.9 earthquake that shook surprised residents in the Northeast Tuesday, and the strengthening hurricane that could hit the Eastern seaboard this weekend.

For some businesses, these headlines are a wake-up call to get their disaster recovery plans in order. The good news: cloud services make disaster recovery preparations more affordable than ever.

Higher Stakes
Although disaster recovery was once considered an expensive insurance policy for rare but catastrophic events such as earthquakes and hurricanes, enterprises are expanding their plans to address all sources of downtime, including mundane power outages (the number one cause of data loss for small businesses, according to research from Aberdeen Group), application failures (the top cause of data loss for large enterprises), network outages and human error.

And downtime occurs a lot more frequently than most people think: more than two-thirds of large enterprises (69 percent) need to recover data on a weekly or daily basis, Aberdeen Group reports.

With information technology now such a critical part of daily business operations, even brief business disruptions -- which may begin harmlessly, involve only one part of a company, and not appear as a more commonly thought of "disaster" -- can have a significant impact on a business, not to mention its customers. Consider the consequences of a lockbox processor missing bank deposit cut-offs on behalf of its customers. More often than not, it is these "quiet catastrophes" that generate the most significant threat to a business and its brand, according to research from Forrester.

Quite simply, there is less and less tolerance for downtime in a 24x7 economy, warns Forrester's Stephanie Balaouras.

By making disaster recovery planning a priority, operations can protect themselves from disasters big and small. Businesses get it. Improving business continuity and disaster recovery is the No. 1 priority for small and medium-sized businesses and the second-highest priority for large enterprises in 2011, according to research from Forrester. Similarly, AT&T's 2011 business continuity study reveals a trend towards greater emphasis on planning and responding to potential threats.

The problem for many of these companies is that it's hard to make capital investments in disaster recovery capabilities when they are under pressure to cut IT costs.

A New Model
Cloud-based archive and document management services offer a way for businesses to safeguard critical content and protect against a disruption in service, at an affordable, transaction-based price that requires no upfront capital investment or ongoing maintenance contracts. What's more, with some cloud services, businesses can leverage an infrastructure that includes mirrored, geographically dispersed data centers for real-time business continuity and automatic fail-over.

More businesses are recognizing the benefits of incorporating cloud technologies in their disaster recovery planning. A majority (54 percent) of organizations surveyed by AT&T currently use or are considering using cloud services to augment their business continuity and disaster recovery strategies. These businesses recognize that cloud services offer tremendous affordability and functionality for business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

The Bottom Line
Businesses can't pick when they'll be impacted by a disaster. But they can control how their organization plans for, and responds to, these events. Using cloud services, such as those for electronic document management, can be a critical element to preventing a disruption in service, protecting client data, and safeguarding the organization's reputation.

Bob Lund is chairman and CEO of eGistics, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based document management solutions. Lund can be reached at 214-256-4610 or via blund@egisticsinc.com.

Process efficiency top IT objective

by Mark Brousseau, guest blogger

Making business processes more efficient and effective is the top objective of IT investments for 90 percent of the private companies surveyed for PricewaterhouseCoopers' latest Private Company Trendsetter Barometer. Streamlining business processes topped better management of enterprise data (identified by 75 percent of respondents), optimizing business information and analytics (73 percent), making business more agile (58 percent), and attracting new customers (58 percent).

And how do the companies hope to improve their business processes? Forty percent say they are likely to invest in cloud computing. What's more, over half of these companies stated that their investments in cloud-based solutions will be focused on "innovation," rather than "maintenance."

I think these companies have the right idea.

Technology plays a critical role in transforming operations and driving competitiveness for private and public companies. As companies look to better position themselves to take advantage of the economic recovery, they'll need a digital platform in place to capture, manage and deliver mission-critical data as efficiently and effectively as possible -- an area where cloud-based solutions shine.

Leveraging cloud-based solutions enables organizations to take a fresh approach to labor-intensive and error-prone document-driven business processes. For instance, eGistics' CloudDocs on-line document management solution eliminates the burden of determining where to store documents -- in terms of files and folders. It can recognize bar codes, which many businesses use to organize packets of documents, or even load documents into the system for indexing later. And once documents are loaded into CloudDocs, users don’t have to worry about where they are located; with a simple command, CloudDocs retrieves them instantly.

This type of functionality can streamline a wide range of applications -- accounts payable, accounts receivable, human resources and legal, to name a few -- freeing staff to focus more of their time on core competencies, servicing customers or developing innovative new products or services.

In my opinion, that makes IT investments in cloud computing money well spent.
_________________________________

Mark Brousseau, Brousseau & Associates
Mark Brousseau is a noted marketer, analyst, speaker, and writer, with more than 16 years of experience advising leading providers of payments and document automation solutions.

Brousseau is president of Brousseau & Associates, a full-service marketing, PR and business development firm based in Central Pennsylvania. With the largest client base of any independent marketing firm specializing in the payments and document automation arenas, Brousseau & Associates counts among its clients many top solutions and services providers.

You can follow Mark on Twitter @markbrousseau

AP professionals see benefits to cloud computing

By Mark Brousseau

Accounts payable (AP) professionals see "minimal IT involvement" as the biggest benefit of using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or cloud computing for AP processing, according the findings of the 2011 AP Automation Study by International Accounts Payable Professionals. Nineteen percent of survey respondents identified "no capital investment" as the biggest benefit of cloud computing or SaaS, while 17.5 percent cited "lower cost per invoice" and 14.3 percent identified "fast start-up."

Some 12.7 percent of respondents identified "no software or hardware " as the biggest benefit.

Randy Davis, vice president of sales and marketing operations for eGistics isn't surprised that these benefits would rank high in the minds of AP staff. "Cloud offerings have always touted minimal IT involvement, no capital investment, fast deployment, and no on-site software as benefits," he notes.

But Davis believes that the ability of cloud-based document processing solutions to remove paper management from AP processing could deliver even greater benefits to AP professionals. "Today's cloud-based AP solutions significantly improve on key usability factors such as electronic capture, structured indexing, search and retrieval, work allocation, data updates and corrections, and audit and tracking -- things that directly contribute to the smooth operation of an AP department," Davis says.

"eGistics believes that business users will increasingly appreciate and accept the benefits of SaaS and cloud computing for critical tasks such as AP processing and management, and that such benefits will soon be taken for granted. At the end of the day, AP departments are looking for solutions that help them do their jobs faster, more accurately and with better accountability," Davis concludes.

What do you think?

eGistics is showcasing CloudDocs at Fusion 2011 in Orlando!

eGistics is showcasing CloudDocs at Fusion 2011 in Orlando!

by Nathan Khani, CloudDocs Solution Specialist

eGistics’ flagship product, CloudDocs, is on center stage at Fusion 2011 with a focus on Accounts Payable! We are busy putting the finishing touches on our new AP Quick Template, which, along with the Human Resources Quick Template, provides users with a running start to take the sting out of business document management. We are very excited to provide a revolutionary way to manage business documents.

Why the focus on Fusion?

Fusion-istas, as I affectionately call them, love innovative ways that bring efficiency to accounts payable and/or accounts receivable. CloudDocs is right up their alley. It saves time and money with its truly innovative way to capture, index and separate documents. It allows users to focus on what they are doing rather than how they are doing it by providing a clean, easy to use interface, and completely relieving the user of the need to know where documents are located. Instead, users can focus on quickly locating documents required to complete the task at hand, whether it be part of an approval process or related to faster, better customer service.

Furthermore, CloudDocs securely protects your sensitive files in an environment that is Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified, compliant with SAS 70, supports HIPAA privacy requirements. For the last 14 years, we have provided secured hosting for major financial institutions. You can be confident that your documents are protected with the same level of security that we provide our banking customers—without the big price tag!

CloudDocs ensures that your AR/AP documents are safe from the threat of disaster. We’ve all heard horror stories about companies devastated by natural disasters. With CloudDocs, electronic copies of your documents are kept in a geographically redundant environment so that regional disasters cannot damage or destroy them.

Currently, we are offering a 30-day trial version of our Standard and Professional Edition plans! Please click here to find more information or to sign up for your free trial. You can also call me directly, and I will be more than happy to address any questions you may have, and help you plan a solution that best fits your company’s needs!

Nathan Khani

CloudDocs Solution Specialist

972.851.3135

nkhani@egisticsinc.com

CloudDocs Takes Air!



Visit egisticsinc.com/clouddocs to learn more!

 by Randy Davis, VP Sales and Marketing Operations

TAWPI Capture 2011 marks the official introduction of eGistics' new flagship product, CloudDocs^TM to the business world. World, meet CloudDocs. CloudDocs, meet world.

CloudDocs is the culmination of over 14 years' of experience in providing for the capture, storage, protection, finding and management of important documents and data for the nation's largest financial services companies. We now bring that experience to the service of the Small and Medium-Sized Business market.

Let me be clear. This is an introduction, not a launch. We want you to be able to learn about CloudDocs, visit the CloudDocs Web site, give us your feedback, and otherwise let us know if you want to be notified when it is available. To entice you a bit, if you register to be notified we'll automatically enter your name into our drawing for an Apple iPad, to be given away in April.

So what does CloudDocs do? In the simplest terms, it helps you complete document-oriented business processes. From your PC, you can scan documents, index them (for easy search and find), securely store them in our Tier 4 data centers, and then retrieve any document (or related documents) with one or more search terms and a click of the mouse.

CloudDocs organizes the documents for you, so you don't have to struggle with creating folders and sub-folders and sub-sub-folders. Nor do you have to worry about file names. By using one or more search terms, familiar to your business, you (or your authorized users) can be viewing documents in seconds, no matter how long they've been stored. No one has to "figure out the filing system." CloudDocs does that for you.

Please visit the CloudDocs Web site and give us the privilege of letting you know when CloudDocs is ready. There is, as they say, no obligation.

Do You Discriminate?

by Randy Davis, VP Sales and Marketing Operations

Well, when it comes to electronic document storage management, you should. Discriminate, that is.

In the cloudy skies of storage management (hosted storage, in the now old vernacular. As a further aside, with a wink and nod to Yogi Berra, have you noted that concepts are getting old much younger now?). Anyway, in the cloudy skies of storage management you almost need a vendor traffic controller to work your way through the congestion. There are some excellent choices out there, depending on what one needs.

Ah, that's the crux of the matter. What does one need? A simple needs assessment may start with a need to store stuff: documents, photos, video, audio, databases, images, graphics and so on. There are plenty of solutions in the Cloud to do that.

But many of those solutions seemed aimed at individuals who need a place to collect stuff, and create some kind of organized, hierarchical schematic that will enable them to pigeon hole stuff with the hopes of finding it later via some search term. Even companies that claim to serve the business community seem designed to encourage the ad hoc storage approach.

The business use of document storage is much more stringent. (Let's see, you need to find the invoice that contains the payment amount for account 837394, paid between March 15 and June 30, 2006. Oh, and you need to see if any explanatory notes or correspondence or payments are attached to the invoice. Can you have all that to your boss in the next 60 seconds, please?)

So, a more thoughtful needs assessment should include a way to easily accommodate standard document data that can be indexed; the ability to associate, attach or link related documents and information together; and the ability to find just the information you need so that you can use it. By the way, one of the many benefits of such an approach is the ability to transfer document research responsibilities to others in a group, temporary employees, or new staff.

Why am I discussing this? Part of the reason is to remind you that we have provided the power of the structured document storage management approach to our enterprise customers for many years. Now we are in the process of providing the same capabilities to the Small to Medium-size Business market. In the next few weeks we'll be introducing you to our new flagship product, CloudDocs(TM).

To keep informed about our plans and upcoming launch, be sure to become a follower of this blog. Just use the Follow button in the right hand column.

Also, don't hesitate to add your experience, opinion or question by using the Comment space below.

Changing the CFO’s Perception of AP

By R. Edwin Pearce

Historically, if you asked a CFO to tell you the first thing that popped into their mind when you mention accounts payable (AP) processing, they likely would have responded with some variation of “cost center.” The fact is, as a percentage of revenue, the costs associated with AP processing typically represent a small blip on the radar of most companies. But as companies have tightened their spending as a result of the recent economic downturn, that blip is now a significant opportunity.

More than 75 percent of AP departments report into the CFO, according to various studies. With CFOs keenly interested in cost containment and improved cash management, AP leaders would be well served to find ways to deliver strategic benefits to the organization. Notably, 56 percent of CFOs believe AP represents a more strategic opportunity for improvements than it did two years ago.

One reason CFOs are changing their tune on AP is that they are seeking ways to avoid further layoffs, while weathering the recession. To this end, most are tightening controls over employee spending and placing greater emphasis on measuring and monitoring the company’s financial health.

These types of activities are clearly in the AP department’s wheelhouse.

CFOs are looking past the traditional paper-encumbered stereotype of AP and focusing more closely on the tremendous amount of financial data that flows through AP. From this perspective, they see AP as a means to improving working capital management, reducing supply chain risk, and greatly reducing the incidence of fraud. Most importantly, CFOs recognize that AP can help a company improve its cash position by extending days payables outstanding, avoiding late payments, capturing early-pay and volume discounts, and ensuring that payments and orders are compliant with contracts.

At many companies, AP no longer is merely a back-office transaction function where efficiency and low cost of operations are the only requisites for success; AP processes are being more tightly linked with treasury functions to help maximize working capital management. This is part of an overall move to align core processes across business functions to support corporate strategic initiatives.

While this increased corporate standing is good news for AP departments, they must also be ready for CFOs to more closely assess their performance based on key criteria such as costs, service delivery, error rates, timeliness of responses to inquiries, compliance, and vendor relationships.

This makes it imperative that AP departments continue their automation initiatives. Not only does automation help AP departments improve on-time payment performance, reduce errors, slash costs and enable greater visibility into financial data. But it also delivers the quantifiable data on process performance that CFOs will require as AP evolves into more strategic partner for their organization.

R. Edwin Pearce is executive vice president of sales and corporate development for eGistics, Inc., a provider of e-document solutions. He can be reached at 214-256-4607 or via epearce@egisticsinc.com.

Seeding the Cloud

By Randy Davis

A recent article in Banking & Payments Industry Update #1447 greeted the new year with prognostications about the use of cloud computing by traditionally conservative stalwarts such as "large banks" (who have been reluctant to outsource anything). Another article in Document Imaging Report (Dec. 23, 2010) waxed prolific on the growing influence of cloud computing on enterprise software, citing predictions by Saugatuck "that as much as 40% of new software sold in 2014 will be cloud-based."

OK. We experienced similar enthusiasm with the advent of ERP, CRM and the paperless society, and we'll see how this cloud euphoria plays out.

Don't get me wrong. I like the cloud, and believe that it will endure as a viable technology for the foreseeable future. I also like the flexibility it can provide in the rapid delivery of "pay as you go" services. In fact, eGistics has been a "cloud player" for almost 16 years, and is strongly moving forward with new, exciting services rooted in a cloud infrastructure. Using a well-worn cliche, "Watch This Space" for upcoming announcements regarding a new cloud e-document storage management service offering, as well as a "Platform as a Service" offering that enables companies to quickly enable their own applications to utilize e-document capabilities.

In the lyrical words of Bob Dylan, "the times they are a changin'," and, looking back on the economy of 2010, we can only say, thank heavens! We at eGistics look forward to working with you to provide new, cost effective and innovative solutions that will enhance your own service offerings to your customers and users.

By the way, please take our poll at the bottom of this blog page to indicate your company's interest in using the cloud!

Happy New Year!