Physical Paper is Your Biggest Continuity Risk
The topic of business continuity for most people begins with servers, cyber threats, and backup infrastructure. Physical documents don’t get a look in. However, for most businesses a significant proportion of their critical operational data still resides on paper, locked in filing cabinets, archive boxes, and storage rooms, one flood, one fire, or one misplaced folder away from being lost forever.
Remote Work Exposed the Compliance Gap
The transition to hybrid and remote work hasn’t manifested new issues surrounding physical documents. It’s more the case that such issues have become more pronounced. A business can’t truly be continuous if their staff relies on physical presence in a central office to access the records they need to carry out their work.
If important operational records physically exist in one location only, then access to that information is contingent on where you are on the map. It’s easy to see why that’s a risky situation. When any kind of disruption occurs, be it a pandemic, a local crisis, or just a building closure for routine maintenance, the entire operation comes to a standstill because the data isn’t where the people are.
The Docshop manages the chain of custody throughout the complete conversion journey, starting from the physical archive collection right through to the supply of ordered, digital, and indexed records suitable for cloud storage or an existing DMS. For enterprises with significant legacy archives, this process demands an expertly-managed logistics solution, not simply a more powerful copier down the hall.
Stored in the cloud and digitized, your records can be accessed by your dispersed team members at the very same time, a level of collaboration even paperless offices struggle to achieve. An automatic audit trail and version history are also concurrently maintained.
The Single Point of Failure Nobody Talks About
A filing cabinet can lead to a total collapse in operations if something happens to it. So can a storage room, an off-site archive facility, and every other place where physical records tend to metastasize. If those records get wet, catch fire, or get stolen, tough luck, you don’t have a backup of the data they contain.
None of this is freak of the week. It happens constantly, for fairly mundane reasons, and the results can range from operations being held up because key data isn’t available, to operations grinding to a complete halt while the odd hundred thousand documents are replaced. The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) has the exact figures on what rebuilding a set of destroyed documents costs: an organization will use $120 of staff time to find a document that’s simply been misfiled, or $220 to reproduce one that’s been lost. Those quickly become operational figures in a crisis that involves dozens or hundreds of files.
On a more day-to-day basis, paper locks insight into data silos, pockets of isolated knowledge that can’t be searched, linked, or accessed remotely. For any organization or data set too big to be managed via a central stack of filing cabinets, it’s an unreasonable inefficiency.
Why Professional Scanning is Different From Office Scanning
Many companies have a multifunction printer and a scan function. But that doesn’t equate to professional document digitization, and it’s where many digital transformation strategies run off the rails. Professional high-speed scanning combined with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) turns a scanned image into a fully searchable, indexable digital record. At the level of size and scope that businesses are dealing with, the difference between the two is enormous. If you want to look up a specific clause from contracts spanning 15 years, OCR-processed documents allow you to search hundreds or thousands of files in seconds.
Image files that were simply passed through as a scan process require you to open each one of those files and read through the content until you find what you’re looking for. Then there’s metadata tagging. Professionally processed documents have structured descriptive data assigned to them, date, document type, department, client identifier, or other uniquely business-specific category, that integrates into your Document Management System and permits automated retrieval, workflow routing, and retention scheduling. This kind of architecture doesn’t come from passing a ream of paper through the office scanner and saving the files to a shared drive.
Regulatory Compliance Doesn’t Wait For a Disaster
Regulatory frameworks that control document keeping are not getting easier. The dictates around storage times, access management and reading become a liability for a company that relies on paper to meet these directives.
Digitized records allow for automated retention schedules, you will always be counting on the system to flag a document at the end of its life and have it destroyed. You can see who looked at the document and when. You can see who sent it where and when. Most importantly, you can produce a tidy folder of all that information promptly and easily, rather than start to go through dusty boxes.
The Real Estate Argument is Straightforward
Storing archives on-site requires space that costs money. In many locations, the cost is high. When you convert legacy paper archives into a secure digital repository, you’re not only removing a source of risk, you’re freeing up physical space that can either be repurposed to generate revenue or simply eliminated from your costs.
That’s not a trivial side effect. For businesses that have been storing paper records for many years, the cost of storing those records (let alone the added cost of storing them in a more secure, off-site facility) is more than the cost of digitization and digital storage over a comparable timeframe.
Information liquidity, how quickly and easily data can be moved, accessed, and leveraged, is what distinguishes the companies that can withstand a disruptive event from those that disappear during one. Physical paper cannot move. Digital records can. That’s the starting point, not the endgame.
