"In our business, we handle many contracts and other documents related to customer transactions, and we have installed a document imaging system to store them," said Fung. "Usually, standard documents are changed to suit the contract, then signed, and we make copies. The originals are sent to our physical store, and the copies can be scanned and linked to our database for searching."

Typical Hong Kong companies do not excel at business continuity planning, and backup activities are often too casual, with no offsite location, even for archive tapes. "The trend is to take backup more seriously, and make more use of data replication between two sites," said Ko. "Smaller companies use a commercial datacenter, with a synchronous link for banks and other companies with online transactions, and cheaper asynchronous solutions for the rest. More serious offsite protection of tapes is another trend."