The paperless office has been talked about for over a decade now. It's an appealing concept. Anyone who's used a filing cabinet can attest to the trouble they cause. One has to depend on coworkers to properly sort everything. The physical nature of a filing cabinet means that only one filing system can exist within it. And it's not uncommon for people to simply walk away with important documents.

Considering whether it's time to change

One might wonder why it's time to finally make the leap to a paperless office. If it's been discussed so much in the past than there must have been issues preventing successful implementation.

And there's some truth to that idea. We had the basic tools needed for a paperless office. A PDA could provide some level of off-site access to documents. And even older microcomputers could handle basic spreadsheets or documents. But there were significant issues with how these technologies operated in real world situations.

The problem with older solutions

Here is an example you might relate to. A PDA seemed like a good solution for off-site access to documents. They had smaller versions of the same office suites most businesses used. And many even had a similar web browser to access internal web portals.

But it doesn't really hold up in real world use. One of the biggest issues was that internet access wasn't as ubiquitous back in the day. And a PDA didn't offer its own ability to access the internet. This meant one was seldom able to access work documents when away from work.

Additionally this type of paperless office had a central point of failure. If something happened to one or two systems in an office's IT department than everything could become inaccessible. The documents might even be destroyed as a result. A paperless office needed to overcome these limitations before it could proceed.

The cloud and modern solutions

The solution to all of these problems are finally widely available. One of the first components is a modern smartphone. Even lower tier smartphones have larger and sharper screens than the PDAs of the past. But more importantly, they come with fast internal internet connections. This ensures that one can access the cloud at any time and from anywhere.

Of course that access is dependent on the infrastructure actually being available. This was one of the key points against a paperless office in the past. But today the cloud can help people go paperless. One of the key reasons is that the cloud removes any central point of failure.

People often know about the cloud from descriptions of cloud computing. This model describes a processor as distributed nodes run in a variety of different locations. However, the cloud also encompasses storage. The two are often tied together into a singular whole.

A cloud based processor uses a larger database structure to point to specific binary or textual data. The cloud structure then replicates and adds redundancy to these points in order to ensure there's no central point of failure. It's not just a method of safeguarding information either. The cloud format also ensures that one can access it through office computers, smartphones or almost any internet enabled device.

There's nothing to lose and everything to gain

In the end, making the leap to a paperless office risks nothing and provides a number of benefits. One removes any chance of documents suddenly getting carried off site. Everything can easily be sorted by any key criteria. This includes sorting by name, data type, year of creation or almost anything else. And finally, it ensures that one can access that information anywhere in the world.