Technology has replaced paper in a lot of places. While there's still room for the physical stuff in our lives, going digital has a number of advantages: it's better for the environment, it reduces clutter, and it saves time by making things searchable. Perhaps the most relatable example would be the rising use of tablets and e-readers. But businesses have a lot to gain from it too by becoming paperless – or at least as paperless as possible.

Digitalizing documents can feel like a daunting task if you deal with a lot of paper on a daily basis or have amassed piles over the years. Not only do you have to scan everything but categorize it and keep organized too. While you can't escape the task itself, it gets much easier with the right equipment and scanning tools, and the payoff for improving information accessibility, management and collaboration is well worth it.

With a unique U-turn paper feed and output, the Canon imageFORMULA DR-C125 not only makes part of the process hands-off, it also has a sleek and relatively small footprint that's ideal for limited office spaces.

The feeding tray takes up to 30 sheets and scan speeds can reach up to 25 pages-per-minute, or 50 images-per-minute scanning both sides of a page at once in duplex mode. Factor in the fully automatic setting where images are captured, de-skewed and rotated as necessary, and you'll breeze through a mixed batch of documents in no time. The software automatically switches between color modes and simplex or duplex scanning, discarding blank pages so you can get everything in one pass without redundancy.

For anything other than what you'd call a typical scan job there's a straight paper path that can handle items such as thick or thin documents, plastic ID or embossed cards and driver licenses. A long document mode for documents up to 118" in length will come in handy for those credit card and service bills that are four-fold.

Priced at just over $400 the DR-C125 comes with a well rounded software bundle that includes the usual OCR, business card scanning and PDF authoring applications, along with Canon's CaptureOnTouch mode that can route scanned images directly to cloud applications such as Evernote and Microsoft SharePoint. Integration with third-party Enterprise Content Management software is also possible with the bundled Mac and Windows drivers.

If you do a lot of paper intensive processing then having a fast and reliable scanner is a must. It'll save time accessing information otherwise buried in paper files by making it digital and available through any web browser or smartphone instead. The Canon imageFORMULA DR-C125 gets high marks in TechSpot's Product Finder that aggregates scores from pro reviewers and fares just as well with buyers on Amazon.com.

This is a sponsored post brought to you by Canon.