Discover what’s hiding in your record storage boxes

Solution Guides

When records are stored without metadata or descriptive information, it’s impossible to understand what you have and make defensible decisions on what to retain, defensibly destroy, or digitise.

30 May 20246 mins

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Identify and make defensible decisions about your records inventory with Iron Mountain Smart Reveal

Business challenge

When records are stored without metadata or descriptive information, it’s impossible to understand what you have and make defensible decisions on what to retain, defensibly destroy, or digitise. Collecting the missing information is a painstaking process that requires manually reviewing and documenting the contents of each box. What happens if you lack the budget, staff, expertise, time, and space needed to complete such an extensive project?

How this affects you

Without a thorough understanding of your records inventory—and thus the ability to make defensible decisions—you have no choice but to store records indefinitely. This not only means unnecessary costs and risks, but also limits your ability to find information or quickly respond to compliance obligations, mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures.

Do you...

store records with few or no box descriptions?
have boxes with unknown content?
need to know what’s inside these boxes?
retain these boxes longer than required?
lack the resources, time and space to figure this out on your own?
hesitate to begin a cleanup project?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, ask us about Iron Mountain Smart Reveal.

Approximately 20% of paper records are stored in boxes with little or no metadata. This makes cleaning up your legacy files virtually impossible.

Records Identification and Cleanup Priorities Survey was conducted via a third-party provider in April 2022.

Know your records inside and out

Get the box-level metadata you need to make defensible decisions.

Smart Reveal is a cost-effective solution that provides both photos and information about boxes of records stored with unknown contents so that you can make informed decisions on what to do: retain, defensibly destroy, update metadata, assign ownership, digitise records, or whatever you require.

The Smart Reveal solution takes pictures of the outside of each box plus an aerial view to help determine what’s inside. The solution provides existing historical metadata so that you will have what you need to assess the contents of each box and make an informed decision about the appropriate action.