Many organisations today are going digital and migrating their physical records from the warehouse to the cloud or their internal servers. A major factor contributing to this decision is continuity in business process wherein critical documents are made readily available to the user. Document security and availability becomes imperative to the organisation as a lot of time and effort is invested in implementing a robust document management system.
However, a common practice in the Document Management industry involves denying customers access to their documents unless they pay a “fee” or “ransom”.
How do digital document storage companies hold documents hostage?
Imagine this scenario: You have purchased an “on-premises” document management system.
You have used it happily for 5 years.
Now the vendor wants you to upgrade to their fancy new Version 2.
They will make your installation “expire” and you will lose access to your documents.
The documents will be stored in an encrypted binary format, so you can’t just copy them off the server yourself.
The vendor will force you to pay an upgrade fee to get the latest version.
Often you will be forced to upgrade your hardware too at a significant cost.
The scenario mentioned above contributes as a major expenditure for the organisation. Both, in terms of an added cost, as well as time. This can also lead to a delay in the processes of an organisation due to the unavailability of these critical records which are held at ransom by the vendor
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We at EisenVault firmly believe that the customers own their documents and should be able to access them always. Unavailability of these documents in such a scenario beats the whole purpose of having a DMS in the first place. We are a customer centric organisation and have developed our systems and policies by keeping all such scenarios of upgradation, expiry et al in mind. We firmly believe in our motto of “Simplifying Document Management” for our customers.
How does EisenVault avoid the above scenario?
We take a number of steps to ensure that this does not happen to our customers:
For On Premises Instances:
Our on-premises software has no “expiry” mechanism. Once you buy it, it is yours.
There is an option to download a folder or search result as a “zip” file at any time from the web application.
We recommend taking backups to an internal FTP / SCP site on the customer’s LAN. These backups can be encrypted with a password that is shared with the customer, or the customer can choose not to encrypt them at all (since the documents are on the LAN, the risk of unauthorised access is lower).
As part of the Annual Maintenance Contract, the customer will regularly receive software updates – ensuring their software is always the latest.
For Cloud Instances
There is an option to download a folder or search result as a “zip” file at any time from the web application – for no extra charge.
The EisenVault technical support team can arrange for a full export of documents and metadata for a small fee to cover the engineer’s effort and data transfer costs.
If a customer decides to cancel the subscription, they will be given at least 1 month to extract all their data from EisenVault.
Client – Vendor relationships are symbiotic in nature. Both organisations flourishing because of the relationship is the ideal scenario and that’s what we, at EisenVault strive to achieve by delivering a great experience to our clients.
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