Risks come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve talked about the four major categories of risks elsewhere, but there are risks that have to do with more than just your operations, your environment or your market. A great example would be the loss of physical and digital documents during Act of God scenarios.
Natural disasters strike when you least expect them. Fire and flooding, for example, catch too many businesses unawares, and the indubitable result is the loss of important, irreplaceable documents, and not just those filed on a drawer or folder somewhere. Digital files stored on your local storage can get affected, too. And if you’re unfortunate enough to lose something as important as the hard drive containing digital copies of your certificates of insurance, you better have some backup plan in place; it’s your risk management plan on the line after all.
If it isn’t already, document management and retention should be covered by your firm’s broader risk management plan. A great deal of minimizing potential losses involves minimizing the amount of documents and files that could be lost. This can be done in a number of ways, but training any employee involved in data retention to distinguish between essential and non-essential documents can significantly help reduce your document exposure. Another way is to store physical documents in different places to reduce the risk should one part of your office building be compromised.
A Valuable Papers Insurance Doesn’t Cover Everything
Normally, the loss of important documents see some coverage in the valuable papers section of your own commercial policy. According to Investopedia, valuable papers insurance “Valuable papers insurance will reimburse the policyholder for the monetary value of any valuable papers such as wills, trusts or corporate charters, that are lost for any reason.”
Written or printed records that are critical to your existence or operations such as deeds, maps, share certificates, etc. are usually covered, but other documents like physical money and securities aren’t. It’s also important to note that digital data is usually excluded from valuable papers policies, so you can count being reimbursed for reconstructing your digital records out.
Lost COIs Will Cost You More Time, More Money
This is problematic for those in insurance compliance who have lost COIs during a natural disaster for two reasons. First, COIs aren’t legal documents, which means a valuable papers insurance can’t help you there to begin with. Second, even if you did have digital copies of your COI somewhere, you won’t be getting any help there as well. COIs are just as integral as anything on your risk management program, so you’re left with no choice but to get them back on file ASAP. That means you’ll have to foot the bill of you opt to use a document recovery service to recover your files and documents, which is not only unbelievably expensive, but also incredibly time-intensive.
If you’re a small business, you probably can’t afford that, and that means those poor souls your COI admins have to go through the trouble of starting again from scratch: collecting COIs from all of your vendors, verifying each one to ensure compliance, and entering all the data into your messy system manually all over again. And if you’ve been watching how they work so far, you know they don’t exactly have the time for that.
COI TRACKER Keeps Your COIs Safe on the Cloud
Believe it or not, there’s a fairly simple solution that will help you avoid all that trouble should you be in – God forbid – an Act of God scenario. With the recent rise of SaaS and other cloud-enabled technologies, companies have found a way to migrate important documents to the cloud and avoid costs related to data reconstruction and file recovery. You can do the same for your COIs by using cloud-based COI tracking software like COI Tracker.
COI Tracker is a 100% cloud-based solution that automatically collects and enters critical insurance data from your COIs and uploads them to a secure server over the internet. Not only does this mean that your files remain safe after a fire or flood, it also saves you time because there’s no system for you to maintain. Use COI Tracker and migrate your COIs to the cloud today!