Moving day: How to protect your company during a relocation

Whether you're moving to a new headquarters or opening a new location or store, you'll need to keep tabs on a wide variety of assets. Careful planning will secure your business and get you back up and running quickly.

By Mary Brandel

September 08, 2010 — CSO —

In its 16 years of business, DataServ Solutions has relocated five times. That makes David Berndt, CIO at the document-digitization and process-automation company in St. Louis, Mo., something of an expert on the topic of securing corporate moves. "By now, we've got a good process," he says. In the most recent move this past February, nothing was lost or damaged. "We shut down the office at about 2:30 on Friday, and we were up 100 percent on Monday, with no disruption for our clients and no service levels missed."

But with all the planning involved in ensuring your most valuable data and other corporate assets get from one location to the next without incident, it takes a few relocations, he says, before you can feel confident you've got it right. Topping his list of lessons learned: Create a cross-departmental moving team, start shredding unneeded documents months ahead of time and, during the move, never take your eyes off the movers themselves. "You have to be very granular in your planning," he says.

Also see 'The 7 deadly sins of building security'

Here, then, are a collection of tips for ensuring the security of your next corporate move.

Start planning your move early
When it comes to planning a move, time is only your friend when you have lots of it, says Alan Nutes, security manager at the Department of Watershed Management for the city of Atlanta. With a good head start, you can make note of specific assets that may require heightened security: blank check stock, any controlled substances or hazardous materials, physical keys and so on depending on your business. You can also create a records-management program for taking inventory of all your sensitive data, both physical and digital, and plan a robust backup strategy, including storing copies offsite. "Unfortunately, security is drawn in as a last resort most of the time," he says. "It's on us as the security team to sell our programs to get to the forefront during the planning stages."

Create a move team
Two months before DataServ's move, Berndt formed a project move team, made up of staff from all seven of the company's business departments. The group met once a week and, over time, formed smaller subgroups dedicated to specific tasks. It used project-management software to track its progress in a way visible to everyone. Beyond the move team, it's also important to consistently update the rest of the company on the status of the moving plan, says Hugo Valldejuli, CIO at Dacor, a luxury kitchen appliance designer and manufacturer. Dacor has endured three corporate moves in the last 30 years, most recently an in-state relocation from Diamond Bar, Calif., to Costa Mesa. "We did a weekly update in our corporate meetings so everyone knew what was going on," he says.

Minimize what you need to move
The fewer things you need to move, the fewer boxes you'll have to track, so this is a good time to purge old, unneeded documents. But disposal needs to be a managed effort, Berndt says. For DataServ's move, he organized a shredding campaign that he began publicizing about six weeks before the move. Employees were told to identify unneeded documents and each week the move team distributed 50-gallon plastic tubs to collect documents for secure shredding and disposal. Berndt educated department managers on the cleanup process to ensure it was followed correctly. "We had to start early to make it successful," he says.

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