What is the role of IT versus the records officer in protecting and backing up vital electronic records?

Protecting and backing up vital electronic records is a shared responsibility. IT and the records officer (or records manager) bring different expertise to the same goal: making sure the records an organization cannot function without survive a disaster and remain trustworthy over time. Problems arise when each assumes the other is handling it.

What the records officer owns

The records officer focuses on the what and why of preservation:

• Identifying vital records. Determining which records are essential to continued operations, legal rights, and obligations (for example, contracts, financial data, personnel files, and key operational systems).
• Setting retention and disposition. Establishing how long records must be kept and when they may be destroyed, so backups are not retained beyond legal need or deleted too soon.
• Defining authenticity and integrity requirements. Specifying the metadata, formats, and controls needed to keep records reliable and usable as evidence.
• Connecting to continuity planning. Ensuring vital records are reflected in the organization’s continuity of operations or disaster-recovery plan.

What IT owns

IT focuses on the how of technical protection:

• Backup and recovery. Designing, running, and regularly testing backups, including offsite or geographically separate copies.
• Storage, access controls, and cybersecurity. Protecting records against loss, corruption, ransomware, and unauthorized access.
• System reliability and media management. Maintaining infrastructure and migrating data off aging or obsolete media and formats before it becomes unreadable.

Where they must work together

The two roles overlap in ways that demand collaboration:

• Long-term digital preservation is more than backup. A backup guards against loss; preservation keeps records readable and authentic across format and software changes. IT supplies the tools, but the records officer defines the standards.
• Defensible disposition. IT should not silently retain or purge data outside approved schedules; records policy must drive technical practice.
• Testing and verification. Both should confirm that vital records can actually be restored and remain complete and accurate.

In short, the records officer decides which records matter, how long they must last, and what makes them trustworthy; IT delivers the secure storage, backups, and recovery capability that make those decisions real. Strong vital-records protection comes from documented, jointly owned procedures rather than informal assumptions.

For related guidance, see the archives and preservation topic hub.