Skip to Main Content
Back to Resources

Cloud-Based Document Management: More Than File Storage

Published: July 17, 2019 (Updated: February 12, 2020)

Many of us are old enough to remember the ways offices used to manage documents. The familiar beige file folders all lined up, alphabetically, numerically, or by some other organizational scheme. You might remember how the dust, coffee cups, and other random office supplies would accumulate on top of it in the closet, between the cubicles, or maybe in the lunchroom by the fridge.

You know, the good old office file share drive?

You may have thought we were referring to a filing cabinet, a large boxy shared drive server, or even a local file storage appliance of some kind. Whatever you had in mind, most of them have been replaced by cloud-based document management applications.

In the 20-teens and beyond, the idea of managing documents in the cloud no longer seems unrealistic. Information workers, IT managers, and business executives are rapidly becoming accustomed to the many benefits of cloud-based document management for some of the following reasons:

  1. Centralized administration of permission control, business process maps, users, groups, and reporting.
  2. Decreased or elimination of costs and resource utilization for maintenance of hardware, databases, and proprietary on-premise software.
  3. Increased flexibility to access documents from outside the office, on user-preferred devices.
  4. The shift of software license capital costs for operational subscription costs and consumption-based pricing.
  5. Data protection, security, scalability and availability which only cloud services providers can deliver.

These are many of the common drivers which incentivize businesses to adopt cloud-based document management. Yet there are document management functions which aren’t native to most cloud storage applications. They are more focused on individual users and document lifecycle management on a micro-level, as opposed to storing, filing, and controlling access to documents on a macro level.

That’s why cloud-based APIs are useful. Using integrated technology, you can add functionalities like viewing, compression, and OCR into your current cloud application with ease. The world is moving away from physical files and on to bigger and better software. Are you?