Digital records of a company in liquidation archived secure and legally

Companies in liquidation are also obliged to retain and keep available the legal and factual documents for a certain period of time.

The company not being mentioned by name for reasons of data protection has various physical and digital data, each of which must be retained for 10 years. Particular expertise is required for the proper and long-term archiving of digital data. archivsuisse has developed a comprehensive and cost-saving archiving concept for the digital data, in which piqlFilm plays a central role. The aim of the project was not only to store the digital data, but also to keep it available at all times together with the physical documents, in order to enable subsequent file inspections at any time during the legally prescribed retention period.

The company’s data was very heterogeneous and consisted of both physical documents in paper form and digital files. The digital documents were Office documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF, but also databases consisting of financial documents from an SAP application. In addition to these files, the various metadata are also part of the properties of this data stock to be archived.

Challenge

Especially the combination of digital and physical records and the unsecured archival suitability of some digital formats and the SAP database pose a challenge for the proper archiving of records for ten years.

Solution

The physical documents were recorded and stored for the period in climatically monitored archive premises in Switzerland. The metadata can be searched by the customer via a user-friendly and secure customer portal and associated documents can be ordered. Likewise, the digital data was checked for readability and corresponding processes for readout were defined so that these could also be read out through the client portal database. In order to keep the costs of archiving at a low level, piqlFilm was chosen as the storage medium. The unique storage technology ensures that the data on film is and remains unchangeable and thus fully legally secure.

Future

By storing all this data on film, a practical and groundbreaking example could be provided of how legally relevant objects to be archived can be stored digitally and sustainably in the long term without dependence on proprietary service providers, in a cost-saving way and without power consumption. The risk of alteration or hacking is virtually eliminated and there is no loss of information due to the secure storage of the bitstream. A combination of paper and digital records are common. For such heterogeneous collections, archivsuisse in cooperation with Piql offers an optimised solution at an attractive price.

Quote from Dr. Christophe von Werdt, managing director and co-owner of Archivsuisse:

“We already have many years of experience in the field of legally compliant archiving of bankruptcy and liquidation documents, and piqlFilm is the optimal storage medium to ensure legally compliant and legally required file storage of digital or hybrid file inventories because it is unalterable and cost-saving.”