1. My organization often finds it challenging to locate contractual documents when we need them the most. Will a cloud storage help?

There is absolutely no debate today that creating a centralized storage of all contracts helps an organization to save money, improve risk mitigation, create better governance and delight customers.

A storage on the cloud provides an easy, cost effective and secure way of maintaining a centralized repository of all contracts. Cloud storage, provides ability to quickly search the relevant document from anywhere in the world, a particularly helpful feature in today’s remote working.

Storing contracts on cloud is not simply about reducing cost or increasing accessibility—its real value comes from increased business agility, resiliency, and access to higher order services from your cloud service provider for contracts.

2. My organization stores contracts in disparate places but we are generally able to locate the contract when we need something. Should we still consider a centralized cloud storage for our contracts?

Even if you are able to generally locate your documents, you will be surprised to calculate the hidden cost in finding them.

Studies conducted show that worldwide, an average knowledge worker spends 36% of the workday looking for and consolidating information, and after searching, they only find the documents they need 56% of the time. According to a PwC study, 7.5% of all documents get lost, and another 3% are misfiled. Add to that the problem of not finding latest version of contracts or not being able to locate a key amendment. This can cost real money to an organization – sometimes as high as 9% of their annual revenues. Thus the cost of finding documents and the cost of missing documents could run into several million dollars over a full year.

Still confused whether you should make a switch to a cloud based centralized repository? Give it a try today and you will not get back to the old habits.

3. We need to store legacy contracts? Is cloud too expensive for such storage?

From your cloud service provider, you should be able to avail very attractive rates for archiving old contracts on the cloud. Storing legacy contracts on cloud saves costly real estate which may be dedicated for more urgent and immediate requirements. On top of that, storage of legacy documents typically cost less than storage of active documents. On a centralized cloud storage, the old contracts can lie as long as they need to be preserved and retrieved easier than the instance when they are physically stored.

4. Often during approval of invoices, I feel the need to refer back to the contract just to make sure that all are in order? Is it easier to pull a contract from cloud than from my local drive?

As we said in the reply to an earlier question, the real value of cloud comes out of very useful services that can be provided along with storage. Modern technology today makes it possible such that hundreds and thousands of contracts stored in cloud can be accessed by searching them for any specific contract, any particular clause, formula, methodology or table that may be lying within those contracts. The whole experience is way more powerful than searching a contract on a local storage and with the added advantage of accessing and collaborating from anywhere.

5. I know that something I am looking for is there in an old contract that my company had signed. How easy it is to retrieve it from the cloud?

If you have a modern cloud based contract storage, It is easier than searching on your laptop. Contracts can be searched through just key words, title or more nuanced attributes – like parties to contracts, expiry dates, amounts involved, etc. Modern systems also enable generation of reports based on stored contracts directly from cloud. If you have in past struggled to find or track the most relevant contracts, cloud storage of contracts with a modern service provider is something that you should give a spin.

Plus one very important Bonus Question

Will my contracts be safer if they are stored on cloud compared to my local drive?

The simple answer is when contracts are stored with a reputed cloud service provider where the storage is offered by industry leaders like AWS or Microsoft Azure, they are safer from cyber threats than the situation when they are stored in company local drives. The best-in-class security mechanism is available with such storage, making it very secure against intrusion and cyber attacks. Cloud storage providers make huge investments in the resources and technology, along with a skilled team of IT experts and engineers that many businesses would not find feasible for deployment.

By Dipankar Bandyopadhyay