You may or may not be familiar with PaperCut MF’s Scan to Cloud Storage feature . If you aren’t, here’s what you should know.
Hang on, what do I mean by cloud storage? I’m talking about services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Box and co.
Ok, let’s get goi … Wait. First, the why. Why is it important to be able to scan to cloud storage?
PaperCut MF’s Scan to Cloud Storage feature turns the humble multi-function into a digital archiving robot overlord from the future. Ok, perhaps a bit dramatic. Essentially, it’s a super easy way to transform paper documents into digital documents and then send those digital documents to the online storage service of your choice.
Ok, let’s get acquainted with the what. And who better to provide the lowdown than PaperCut Portland’s Aaron Pouliot, Senior Technical Support Engineer and general all-round brainy dude (with questionable hat choices) when it comes to Scan to Cloud Storage.
It’s so easy
“Scan to Cloud Storage is dead-simple to set up. That’s the first thing you need to know,” Aaron says when we catch up. “It’s even easier to set up than scan to email.”
Ok, so how easy’s easy?
“Getting it configured is literally as simple as clicking “activate” on your PaperCut server.”
Yeah ok, that’s pretty easy.
“You don’t have to set up a service account or email,” Aaron continues. “Or an SMTP relay. Plus, it gets users around the 20MB attachment limit that often prevents users from scanning large documents.”
When I start to shift the conversation towards security, he enthusiastically interrupts me.
“It’s also easier to set up than Scan to Folder,” he says. “And you’re one step closer to doing away with your on premise file server.”
Ok, so that sounds pretty great to me.
“No more wrangling with Sharing and NTFS permissions just so that guests can retrieve their documents from a shared folder,” he finishes.
But can it be trusted?
I (finally get to) ask Aaron his thoughts on security.
One of the biggest questions we hear about PaperCut’s Scan to Cloud Storage from sysadmins is whether it can be trusted to securely handle their user’s data. People scan sensitive documents all the time, including drivers licenses, passports, and medical records, so it’s absolutely critical that this information stays away from prying eyes.
“Security’s built into PaperCut’s Scan to Cloud Storage feature from the earliest stages of development,” he tells me. “And it’ll continue to be a great priority for us”.
“We respect our users’ privacy,” he continues.
“Once a document is successfully uploaded to cloud storage, it’s deleted from our system forever. And if the user fails to authorize PaperCut, or we have an issue, the document will be automatically deleted after 24 hours.”
Aaron’s finding his groove now - clearly it’s a topic he loves:
“We will never retain users’ documents, or look through this information for marketing purposes or any purpose for that matter.
“We treat our users’ information like we want ours to be treated.”
Is it safer than emailing documents, I ask him?
“Scan to Cloud Storage is more secure than email,” Aaron says. “Email isn’t always the most secure method of transmission. The problem is that not every email provider bothers encrypting data in transit.”
I did a little digging and uncovered GMail’s transparency report to illustrate the problem Aaron’s referring to.
“Whereas with Scan to Cloud Storage, documents in transit are always encrypted from the PaperCut server to the user’s cloud storage destination.”
What about GDPR?
A hot topic for anyone with EU clients is of course General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. So I ask Aaron about Scan to Cloud Storage’s compliance with the new regulation.
“Short answer is, it’s GDPR Compliant,” he says. “Users can ask what information we know about them. The only personally identifiable information we have about users is their name and email address. Our thinking is, the less we know, the better!”
“All logs are deleted after 30 days,” he continues. “As per our cloud platform policy. Plus, of course, users have a right to be forgotten.”
Conveniently, PaperCut MF is also GDPR compliant and will only connect to cloud storage providers that are also GDPR compliant.
Is this thing on?
Finally, I ask Aaron to share his thoughts on uptime.
“Oh, it’s reliable and highly available,” he says brightly. “PaperCut Cloud Service runs on the Google Cloud Platform, which is highly reliable. It’s the same infrastructure Google uses for its own products such as search, Drive and Maps. Google states that the ‘Service will provide a Monthly Uptime Percentage to Customers of at least 99.95%’.”
That’s pretty reassuring, I tell him. And he agrees.
And that’s the story of Scan to Cloud Storage , as told to me by Aaron. Thanks, Aaron.
Got questions? Check out these handy Scan to Cloud Storage FAQs .
