Physical VS Digital

If you’re still asking yourself if you should be storing your documents electronically, then the answer is yes. You may need, or want, to keep paper copies of them as well. This should, however, be the exception rather than the rule. Here’s what you need to know.

Does your business still need paper documents?

The future of a paperless office has been making its way through organizations for a while now, and with many employees working remotely, figuring out what to do with company data has come to the forefront of many businesses’ minds.

When it comes to physical vs digital data however, which is most suitable? As there are some paper documents which hold private and personal data, is it best to digitise these? Or is it better to put them into storage – abiding by document retention regulations, for safekeeping.

Electronic documents are a prerequisite for remote work

You may be desperate to bring your staff back into the office, but you still need to think about what the future might bring. The ability to work remotely gives you a clear Plan B if you ever lose access to your place of business (again). It also gives you more flexibility in hiring or putting work out to freelancers.

If none of this is enough to tempt you, there’s still the fact that electronic documentation can help to streamline workflows. This means saving time and that means saving money.

If you’re required to keep certain documents in paper format, then it’s far safer to keep them in secure, offsite storage. You can always keep an electronic copy of them just in case your staff need quick access to them. Typically, however, this is unlikely. Having an electronic copy of important documents can, however, be a useful safeguard.

Electric documents tend to be easier to manage

GDPR has been slightly amended post-Brexit. All the basic principles, however, still apply. As a recap, you can only collect the minimum amount of data required to fulfill a legitimate purpose. You must do so with informed consent, and you must allow the data subject full control over that data.

It is this last point that makes electronic documents far safer than paper. If a data subject requires you to provide, change or delete data, it is far easier to do so with electronic documents than with paper ones. The reason for this is simple, electronic documents can be actively managed in a way paper documents cannot.

For example, they can be tagged and searched. They can be put into storage with granular access controls. Any copies made of them will automatically be tracked in the same way as the original. All activity relating to them can be automatically logged.

In addition to all of this, electronic document storage is both more space-efficient and more scalable than paper document storage. You can, quite literally, put an entire filing-cabinet’s worth of data on a USB stick. Given the sort of quantities of data held by even small businesses, this is a major benefit.

Electronic documents disperse risk

The fact that electronic documents can be stored in relatively little physical space means that it’s much easier to keep multiple copies of them. As a rule of thumb, you want a working copy, plus one local backup and one local archive and one offsite backup and one offsite archive.

This may sound like a lot, but it’s actually fairly easy even for SMEs to organize. What’s more, the terms “local” and “offsite” are relative. For example, if you’re a “cloud-only” company, then your local backup would be in your main cloud and your offsite backup would be in another cloud.