Finding the Silver Lining: Moving government to the cloud
Introduction
What ever happened to the promise of the paperless office? In 1975, Businessweek confidently predicted that “the use of paper in business for records and correspondence should be declining by 1980 and by 1990, most record-handling will be electronic."
In this modern age of digital marvels – when even the humblest of smartphones is a research library, a news studio, a business centre and a communications hub – we continue to drown in paper. The consumption of paper has grown 400% in the last 40 years and is expected to rise to 440 million tons by 2015. Despite paper being an environmental vandal, the paperless office - like the personal jetpack and the hoverboard - has yet to eventuate. However the twin impetuses of cloud computing and the rollout of improvements to broadband may bring us closer to that vision.