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Labgroup, your trusted service provider for legal electronic archiving.
Labgroup – the leader for document archiving becomes the first trusted provider for legal electronic archiving
As a third-party archiver for 40 years in Luxembourg, Labgroup had to prepare itself for the future by initiating its digital transformation in the early years of the 21st century. The strategy aimed to be the leading edge in the evolution towards a paperless society. In parallel with investing in a state-of-the-art, highly protected storage and archiving infrastructure, Labgroup has developed a comprehensive and continuously improved Information Security Management System (ISMS).
These efforts to control risks were rewarded in 2014 by obtaining the ISO 27001 international certification (already a first for an archiver in Luxembourg), in terms of information security management covering all related activities (digitisation, physical and electronic archiving). With this first step achieved, it remained to obtain the new status of PSDC, created by the law of 25th July 2015 on electronic archiving.
The Luxembourg law of the 25th of July 2015 specifies the requirements under which electronic copies may benefit from a presumption of conformity with the original & sets out the rules applicable to the activity of providers of digitisation and/or archiving services (PSDC).
Furthermore, the law defines the requirements for:
- The digitisation of original documents as digital copies
- The archiving of digital copies and digital form originals
Luxembourg becomes one of the first countries to adopt such legislation and opens the way for the simplification of conservation and archival research.
Note that Labgroup is certified as:
- Provider of Digitisation Services, in other words, Labgroup is empowered to create legal electronic copies of paper documents;
- Provider of Conservation Services, which guarantees the integrity, confidentiality and persistence of electronic archives throughout their retention period.
At European level, the eIDAS (Electronic Identification and Trust Services) regulation 910/2014, which has been fully implemented since the 1st of July 2016, has clearly demonstrated the willingness of member states to democratise digitisation by:
- enhancing the security of electronic exchanges;
- recognising the universal value of the electronic signature;
- granting the legal value to a digital document.
While Luxembourg has been a precursor with this new law, other countries have also embarked on the path of digital transformation by introducing an attractive legal regime for electronic archiving. However, no other country engages the state through the certification of service providers, such as the PSDC status in Luxembourg.
By archiving in Luxembourg, companies in those countries could therefore both exploit their national legislation and benefit from the guarantees offered by the PSDC status.
Indeed, the rules and requirements to which Labgroup must comply as a PSDC are equivalent to those established by the Belgian law of July 21, 2016, called Digital Act, and the French decree of December 5, 2016 on the reliability of the copies and taken for the application of Article 1379 of the Civil Code.
The French and Belgian judges will, therefore, find, in the certified conformity of the PSDC in Luxembourg, objective reasons to rule favourably on the reliability of the digital copy.
Some of the PSDC obligations are:
- Good management and administrative organisation
- “Adapted” procedures and methods
- Information prior to any contract
- Professional secrecy
- Full ownership of the production equipment required to store at least 1 copy in Luxembourg
- Transparency
- Transfer or return of copies in case of termination of activity, i.e. ensure reversibility
It is therefore with confidence, with the guarantee of the state, that the holders of information can now choose between:
- continuing to outsource their paper records with Labgroup, or
- requesting Labgroup to digitise their paper archives, then destroy them and only keep the electronic copies.
- Written agreements and binding contracts under article 1334 of the Civil Code duly signed.
- Documents referred to under article 16 of the Commercial Code such as:
- Accounts (except balance sheets and profit & loss accounts)
- Invoices, correspondence, and all supporting documents
- What are the benefits of a paperless office?
- 3 to 5 % of organisation’s files are lost or misplaced.
- Large organisations lose a document every 12 seconds.
- Managers spend an average of 4 weeks a year searching/waiting for/on misfiled, mislabeled, untracked, or “lost” papers.
- More than 70% of today’s businesses would fail within 3 weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.
Source: The Paperless Project
