Unleash Your Documents: The Power of the Cloud Revealed!

Today’s “cloud” is nothing new — it’s existed in some form since the 1960s. But since the cloud first began to gain popularity around 2006, there has been much mystery surrounding what it is and does. At its core, the cloud refers to the delivery of hosted services over the internet. The benefit of cloud computing is that it enables organizations to use computing resources, such as storage or an application, as a service or utility rather than building and maintaining these infrastructures in house.

The mystique of the cloud itself also surrounds products that bring cloud computing to organizations. Many see Adobe Document Cloud as a means of storing documents securely for your organization in a way that makes them easily accessible from any location. But it is so much more than document storage. By unraveling some of the mystery around the cloud, you’ll soon see that it can help unleash your documents and make them work hard for you and your organization.

Anything you can do, the cloud can do better

And faster and more efficiently. As I’ve written about before, tasks surrounding documents (their creation, signatures, storage, accessibility, etc.) are some of the most time-consuming tasks for organizations. And even though the tasks involved in generating, storing, and retrieving documents and gathering signatures take up a lot of time, they’re often the last ones addressed with digital transformation. The cloud is the remedy for document woes in your organization.

Documents aren’t just created as standalone pieces of collateral within your organization. They’re most often the product of your standard business practices, and are created for a specific purpose. To that end, documents are a tool that’s used every day during normal business activities. If the documents need to be used, then it’s important that they are used in the most effective way possible. Part of that effectiveness is making it easy for the document to complete its task.

Using a Document Cloud can help push your documents through your business processes with ease. Not only does it get documents created, shared, and signed faster — it accelerates your business. Using the cloud for your document processes enables you to save 50 hours of work per person, per year, and gets documents signed 21 times faster than with manual processes.

Moving beyond traditional documents

Thinking about documents beyond their classic usage is an important step in understanding how powerful the cloud truly is. Documents do much of the heavy lifting for businesses — from ensuring compliance and solidifying partnerships, to new employee onboarding and purchasing — as a driving force of business activities. But generally, when we think about documents, we see them as a necessary evil, paperwork that must be taken care of before we can begin our real work.

And focusing on your work is what you should be doing, which is why the cloud is such a powerful tool for organizations. It shortens the time we spend on documents, and takes the effort out of generating forms, gathering signatures, storing sensitive information, and much more.

Once you’re ready to take advantage of cloud capabilities, you can truly unleash them by taking them with you via mobile apps, which may allow you to organize pages, edit text, and comment on your PDFs, and sign, share, and store documents. All of this on the go, wherever you are, so you never miss a beat. When you put your documents to work for you, you’re no longer held hostage by your processes — and can get back to your work faster.