Businesses have been storing their documents in the cloud for over a decade. This practice allows business owners and employees to access important cloud based documents or document management software via the internet with ease from any device. This arrangement offers numerous benefits to businesses and is only going to get more popular in the future.
Here are three ways in which cloud based document storage can help businesses.
1. Saving paper
The most obvious benefit of using digital documents is that it saves paper. When documents can be accessed and created digitally, the need for printed documents is largely reduced (save for a few exceptions).
Storing digital documents in the clouds further eliminates the need for paper documents, as there is no need to print and mail documents to employees and clients when they could be accessed with ease using the online storage cloud.
This practice also saves valuable office space as cabinets cluttered with physical documents will no longer be needed in the office. This space could then be better utilized for other items such as workstations or office equipment.
2. Secure backups of data
Many businesses that use digital documents tend to save them on physical hard drives. While most hard drives are believed to be reliable, they do tend to fail or get damaged over time.
Around 1.8% of hard drives fail every year. More often than not, the data on these drives cannot be recovered. This poses a problem for businesses that store valuable or sensitive data on these drives.
However, if businesses choose to store their digital documents on an online cloud or internal server with secure backup protocols in place, their documents can remain safely stored indefinitely. The servers these clouds are hosted on also have the potential to fail, but most cloud service providers maintain their servers well and regularly back up the files saved to the server cloud.
Once your documents have been converted to digital format, it is safer and more efficient to manage them using a cloud based document management software and then it is to store them on a hard drive. This is why using cloud storage is considered a more effective approach for preventing data loss than traditional methods.
3. Easier access to data
In addition to being safer, digital documents saved on clouds are also easier to access remotely. Employees with the right authorization credentials can access and/or download these documents from any location with internet access.
This can also make it easier to share documents with others. Especially if the files are too large to send via email.
Some businesses use third-party bulk document scanning services to scan their documents before uploading them to the storage cloud for sharing. This process is made easier and more efficient when documents can be uploaded to the cloud remotely.
Business owners or employees that are seeking document cloud storage services should spend some time researching the various companies that offer cloud based document storage services. Certain companies tend to have a better reputation than others and can do a better job of backing up your documents and keeping them safe for your business.