Whitepaper: Managing Business Documents in the Cloud
Online access to all company documents from any location
Cloud access makes sense for today’s laptop equipped employees, who can retrieve any business document from home, while waiting for a flight, or while in a meeting at a client’s office. Organizations with multiple office locations can share data from a single repository, rather than from separate, unrelated systems and folders.
Freedom from the responsibilities of server Ownership
Operating servers requires the tasks of monitoring, maintenance, and administration, as well as expert troubleshooting when a server goes down. Companies that leverage cloud solutions are liberated from not only the initial costs of buying dedicated hardware and software, but also from the unpredictable costs of ownership.
No capital expenditures
Hosted storage and software services are classified as operating expenses, while in-house servers and software licenses are categorized as assets. Companies pay for hosted services much like they do utility bills. This accounting re-categorization enables companies to maintain their capital budgets for other projects.
Greater reliability
While servers have a reputation for downtime that stalls work progress, cloud systems deliver an average uptime of 99.97%. Cloud vendors store data on massive state-of-the-art servers and continually cycle storage through reserve systems.
Better protection against data loss
Laptops can be lost, hard drives can fail, and servers can crash. Storing and managing information in the cloud protects companies against accidents that can occur to physical devices. The service provider performs backup of cloud content regularly.
More control over information access
Multiple firewalls protect against unwanted access from the outside, while document management permissions place password controls on specified files or document types, which enforces privacy of sensitive material internally.
Seamless scalability for future changes
If more storage capacity is needed, the organization simply pays the vendor more, rather than purchasing additional licenses and servers. Conversely, if work is cut back and a subscriber now has fewer users, the monthly fee goes down, making cloud-based document management more responsive to business cycles.
