What are the sustainability benefits of using a document management system alongside secure document storage in the Cloud?

Filestream works with partner Sire Cloud to provide businesses with a seamless solution and also aid productivity

document management and cloud storage fall into two main areas, sustainability and productivity. They work together, one effortlessly leading to the other.

In today’s world, ambitious, growing SMEs, and corporates, large or small, are keen to ensure their ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) credentials are meeting current standards. Linking their document management and cloud storage is a huge step to attaining this.

We have worked with our partners at SIRE Cloud to produce a solution using the combined advantages of File Stream document management and the UK based SIRE Cloud platform.

How does this help any business meet sustainability goals?

Increasingly, businesses are taking sustainability seriously. Many make the leap for their own ethical reasons. However, many often realise they have little choice as their customers are insisting more and more that suppliers show evidence they are actively working to be more sustainable. Failure to do so can be very serious and even long-standing, successful, productive, and profitable business relationships can come to end.

Here are some examples of how a Cloud-based approach to document  

management and storage can help sustainability goals and improve business 

practices:

• Stops document replication - only one copy of a document is kept with access granted to all who require it. Changes to the document are captured, meaning the document available to users is always the latest version. The common practice of copying documents to personnel folders, which before long are likely out of date is eliminated.
• Removes unwanted or older versions of documents - document retention is a standard feature of most good document management systems. Rules can be set to alert users when documents are suitable for deletion. This can be for legal reasons or just when the company decides they are no longer needed. Deleting these unwanted documents releases valuable cloud storage space, making room for more or simply saving the energy costs to maintain them.
• Keeps file sizes to a minimum - good file compression can keep a typical pdf of a text document down to 20 to 40 kb per page. A document management system can easily highlight when files are unnecessarily large and this feature alone can significantly increase the performance of a computer drive, saving energy.
• Saves valuable time - it is an established fact, that time wasted searching for documents in a manual system. is hugely expensive to businesses. Indeed, some are never found, as the task is too great. Cloud storage linked with electronic document management makes searching for a document effortless, whether you are in the office, at home or at a customer site.
• Increases Productivity - any existing manual process can be designed as an electronic version. For example, signing off invoices or handling a new starter process. Users who need to take action, are alerted automatically when something needs their attention, regardless of where they are working from. This is enormously beneficial to the environment and the company’s bottom line, by saving time and travel costs to manually action documents.

Why use our Cloud storage?

All backups, antivirus/malware software, firewalls, and Microsoft 365 are maintained to the highest standards. This removes a considerable burden of responsibility as well as freeing up valuable time.

Additionally, a program like File Stream which has a zero-carbon footprint (similar to an on-line banking application), enables access to the Cloud where the documents are stored from any device and from anywhere, via the internet.

The SIRE Cloud servers (and therefore the documents) remain in the UK. They are protected in different locations (data centres) that are also in the UK. This gives confidence to businesses that their important information is stored as locally as possible.

What are the sustainability advantages of the SIRE Cloud servers?

Once the data is stored it will remain on storage devices which are three times more power-efficient than a PC hard disk.

SIRE select data centres that use 100 per cent renewable energy to power the data centres and have been doing so since 2011. Working with Sire on sustainable technologies and policies has ensured a PUE of 1.14. This is lower than the global average of 1.57. (to understand what a PUE is, see the fact-file below).

Cold-aisle containment:

There are many different ways for data centres to deliver cooling to the servers on their data floors. At the Sire data centre one way this is managed is using cold-aisle containment which forces cool air over servers rather than escaping: The server racks make up the walls of cold aisles, with doors and a roof sealing the corridor.

Chilled air is delivered through the floor into the aisle. Since it has nowhere else to go, the chilled air is forced through the walls of the corridor, and over the servers.

Adiabatic cooling towers:

Adiabatic cooling towers are one of the ways to generate chilled water. They use the natural process of evaporation to cool water down, so the only power used is to pump the water through the towers. These cooling towers can keep up with cooling on the data floor, even on the hottest days of the year.

Efficient UPSs:

They have invested in state-of-the-art UPSs with line-interactive / ‘Smart Active’ efficiency of up to 98.5 per cent. This means only 1.5 per cent of energy is lost in the transfers, significantly less than data centres. (See fact-file below for more information on UPSs).

LED lights on motion detectors:

Reducing energy consumption goes beyond just the data floor. Throughout the data centres there are energy-efficient LED bulbs. These are also fitted with motion detector switches, so that they turn off automatically when no one is using a room.

Want to know more?

Get in touch with us (link to enquiry form) to find out how this partnership can help your business or organisation become more efficient, productive, and sustainable. We look forward to hearing from you.

Fact-file:

• Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is the standard way of measuring a data centre’s energy efficiency. Each data centre has a PUE score, which should be as low as possible, with 1 being the theoretically perfect score. A PUE score is calculated like this:  PUE Score = Total energy used by a data centre ÷ Energy just used by servers. So, the less energy a data centres uses to operate all of its facilities the lower their PUE score will be.
• Uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) are equipment that protect data centres from power failures. They are effectively huge batteries that power the data centre while generators kick in. All of the electricity supply for a data centre will go through their UPSs, and an unfortunate side effect is lost energy as it passes into and out of the batteries.