Why You Should Consider ECM In The Cloud
Enterprise content management (ECM) systems have evolved over the years to keep up with demand from clients. Globe News Wire mentions that the ECM market may hit $43 billion by 2026, thanks to the incorporation of AI and ML together with ECMs. However, the development of ECM has shifted focus from on-premise deployments towards cloud-based systems. As more companies start to realize the efficiency and viability that cloud deployments offer, they are starting to adopt cloud ECMs as their content management solution.
Gartner, a staunch supporter of ECM services, had come out in 2017 to state that ECM in its current form was dead and that content services were where businesses should look at as an alternative. Gartner's shocking disclosure hit a lot of companies that looked to them for guidance relatively hard. However, when one examines their reasoning, it seems like a logical conclusion. ECMs in their current state have no place in modern enterprise content management.
Legacy ECMs suffer from several shortfalls that impact the efficiency of a business. Nuxeo found in a survey of UK companies that the average knowledge worker spent about 11% of their time finding content that was distributed among several servers on the intranet.
While this doesn't seem like a massive figure, when one considers that hundreds or even thousands of workers are involved in these tasks daily, the combined volume of wasted time adds up significantly. Getting the right information at the right time is crucial in streamlining business operations. Managing this situation usually means moving away from legacy ECMs into something more modern.
Modernising your Content Management
Legacy ECMs are still functional, but they can be very cumbersome. The longer a business spends using an old ECM, the harder it is to change. Several companies have already looked towards getting their processing systems on the cloud, but adoptions of cloud-based ECMs are slower. A lot of companies aren't even looking at the cloud, but instead are considering updating their old ECMs. The measure may work, but it merely puts a bandage on the problem rather than fixing it outright. Legacy ECMs were the cutting edge a decade ago, but today's technology requires an updated ECM system to work alongside it.
IBM notes that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is seeing adoption in many commercial applications, suggesting that companies are considering the move to the cloud for their content management services. However, the cloud giant overlooks some of the most straightforward benefits that a cloud-based ECM offers to its clients. Among these noteworthy benefits are:
- Ease of Use: As everything is stored on the cloud, there's no need for employees or management to dig through several servers looking for the right data. This simple interface saves time in decision-making processes and can lead to faster processing time for actionable results. other file-sharing systems exist, but they lack the level of security that a cloud system offers to a business.
- Security: There has been a lot of reports about breaches to cloud systems, making many enterprises worry about the safety of their cloud-based data. However, as the Wall Street Journal reports, most of the cloud breaches that occur are due to human error, not an issue on the part of the cloud security. Once a company can configure its cloud correctly, it shouldn't have to worry about data breaches.
- Cost: Maintaining on-premise servers can be expensive. Keeping them up to date with technology and hardware takes time and money, both in the form of buying the equipment and employing an IT department whose task is keeping those systems running. Cloud-based ECMs avoid this problem by delegating control of the hardware to the cloud provider for a minimal cost. The maintenance department can be cut down to a single professional dealing with the business's implementation of cloud security.
Why ECM in the Cloud is the Future
It doesn't matter if a company is concerned with running an ecommerce-based business or operating a mobile-friendly website, having a cloud-based ECM offers benefits to the business's efficiency. ECM in the cloud leverages SaaS to offer what a business needs for a minimal cost. For a company, moving onto the cloud may be a hassle, but it's a one-time investment of time and money that will see returns within the first year of use. The cloud has already proven itself as a useful ally of enterprises, and ECM in the cloud is simply the most recent iteration of the benefits it provides.