How it Can Cost You $20 to File Away a Paper Document

Digital file storage has been a game-changer for many small and medium-sized businesses that heavily rely on file retention. Instead of storing paper records in a huge room dedicated to file storage, businesses are focusing on digitizing their records and storing them electronically in storage systems designed for use in the cloud.

However, efficiency is far from the only benefit that comes from using electronic record storage. Without the crippling costs associated with printing paper copies of your records, you’ll be shocked to find out how much money your business can save simply by cutting down on how many documents you print out yearly. An infographic by data management company Solix exposes the raw numbers that show just how much an enterprise can save by moving away from paper archiving, and establishing a cloud archiving solution.

Though the infographic does mention Hadoop, we want to emphasize that the real point of interest here is the sheer amount of savings that can be enjoyed. It’s also worth mentioning that the infographic assumes a company size of around 500 employees. Here are some of our favorite highlights from the study:

• In terms of sheer costs: 5,000,000 sheets of paper are used every year by enterprises, which equates to an equivalent of about 1.6 terabytes (in reality, not that much data. At the time of writing this, a 2 terabyte hard drive runs about $100) for users of cloud archiving. Just imagine how many trees you can save by not printing out that many sheets of paper. The overall annual costs associated with printing and storing documents runs around $140,000+ annually, while the costs of maintaining a cloud archiving system are generally less than $1,000/year. Imagine what you could do with all of this saved revenue.
• In terms of ease of access: Solix found that it costs up to $20 in labor to file a paper document. Additionally, finding documents after they’ve been stored away costs organizations $120 in labor, while recreating misplaced documents can cost up to $220. Cloud archiving eliminates these costs by allowing users to easily search for documents.
• In terms of security: Only 45 percent of users feel that paper documents that are locked in filing cabinets are secure, while 65 percent are more comfortable with password-protected digital documents. Additionally, we’d like to mention that a disaster can easily wipe out physical copies of a file. A fire or flood could cause irreparable damage to paper documents, whereas a digital file storage system can be easily backed up and restored in a moment’s notice.

Well, there you have it. It’s almost unbelievable just how much paper gets printed and used by large companies. If big enterprises spend this much on printing costs, what does that say for smaller businesses? It doesn’t necessarily matter how much printing your organization does. Rather, you should think of it in terms of a chance to cut down on costs that are unnecessary and counterproductive to your budget. SCW can help your organization eliminate unnecessary costs by optimizing your IT infrastructure. To learn more, give us a call at (509) 534-1530.