Go paperless!

Solution Guides

Learn how Iron Mountain digital solutions can help you accelerate your digital transformation initiatives to become a paperless organisation

20 January 20256  mins
Stack of documents

Challenges

  • Supporting environmental sustainability
  • Complying with government regulations and reducing risk
  • Improving efficiency and profitability
  • Boosting employee productivity
  • Providing excellent customer service
  • Avoiding costly manual errors
  • Maintaining the confidentiality and security of sensitive information

Introduction: The unseen environmental saboteur

Like the air we breathe, paper is such a part of our daily lives, it’s almost invisible. But as governments race toward net‑zero greenhouse emissions by 2050,1 sustainability advocates are looking at everything. And the paperless movement is building momentum.

Consider that 50% of business waste and 26% of landfill waste is paper.2 Business correspondence alone releases 750 thousand metric tons of CO2 annually— which would take 12 million trees 10 years to offset.3 The negative impact of paper on sustainability is clear.

Environmental sustainability is not the only negative impact of paper. Reams of physical paper documents lead to silos of digital and physical information, lack of integrated workflows, and increased risk of data loss. They lead to compliance violations, and simply not having a full and accurate accounting of information. Record and information managers are stuck without a way to manage siloed and growing data sources holistically and strategically. Meanwhile, users spend valuable time looking for, and waiting for, documents, manually sifting through information for insights.

Today, nearly every organisation can benefit from a paper‑free or paper‑light office with a digitally enabled workforce. Digitising paper‑based information and combining it with digital‑native information in a unified workflow gives you power to outpace the competition by protecting sensitive data, maintaining regulatory compliance, boosting efficiency, and deriving value from physical and digital data sources—all while helping reduce the impact of global climate change.

50% of business waste and 26% of landfill waste is paper. Making one sheet of paper uses up to 13 liters of water.
The World Counts

Take document scanning and digital storage to the next level

You can trust Iron Mountain®, a global business dedicated to the storage, protection, and management of information and assets, to provide solutions that meet your sustainability and organisational needs. Iron Mountain experts can help you:

  • Digitise paper documents: You can digitise existing paper documents, or Iron Mountain can digitise them for you.
  • Get information faster: Teams can securely scan, upload, or create electronic documents within the Iron Mountain InSight software platform from a web browser. It extracts, classifies, and verifies information with speed and accuracy, quickly turning documents into information you can use to reveal deeper insights, faster.
  • Connect data across platforms: Integration with existing systems connects data across platforms to break down information silos and provide secure access to relevant information.
  • Enable anytime, anywhere access: Depending on the use case, employees, customers, and other stakeholders can easily access and search documents.
  • Automate workflows: Intelligent document processing with low‑code/no‑code capabilities make it possible to tailor automated workflows, increasing efficiency.
  • Protect your business: Auditable chain of custody, secure storage, data encryption, access restriction, and role‑based permissions keep data safe. Incorporate and automate data retention policies, while speeding response time to audits.
  • Manage the entire lifecycle: Iron Mountain can securely store, or dispose of assets by shredding and recycling them.

Iron Mountain paperless solutions portfolio

Iron Mountain gives you a choice of use‑case‑specific paperless solutions.

Iron Mountain InSight

If your organisation is ready to go paperless, you could be ready for an intelligent document processing and workflow automation platform.

Designed to help you maximise efficiency and security, Iron Mountain InSight can provide a centralised view of your information. It allows secure access and retrieval for your teams in a cloud repository for enhanced visibility and access.

InSight adds structure to your organisation’s unstructured content. It aggregates and connects physical and digital information, extracting key metadata out of documents and automating document-centric workflows to help you get to relevant information faster.

And if you need more assistance in setting up your paperless workflows, Iron Mountain’s Professional Services team can work with you to further your digital transformation. To learn more, download Iron Mountain’s Go Paperless guide.

Start reducing paper now

Contact us to learn how Iron Mountain document scanning and digital storage solutions can help you go paperless or paper light to help protect the environment while delivering better business outcomes.