When Compliance is a good thing.

For years we've been talking about the "paperless office", and for years there's just not any budget for it. Even though the costs of printing can be greatly reduced by storing everything in electronic form, we never got around to implementing the system.

The reasons normally revolve around the cost in man-hours of the type of document categorization that is required for effective ILM. For smaller shops it takes a lot of time and money. For larger shops it takes more.

But some compliance issues are forcing us to do that categorization. And some organizations are finally making the jump to truly paperless. Storage has progressed to the point that it is possible to ensure long-term viability of documents, and document technology has progressed to the point that most forms of document can be brought into the system.

So thank the regulators that we're finally finding the time and money to do what we probably should have been doing all along - saving money and tons of storage space by putting things into storage that are best stored there anyway.