In the past few years, the cloud has gained a lot of momentum and seen widespread adoption. It has some substantial advantages when compared with traditional on-premises deployment, such as low TCO, agility to set up, less dependency upon highly skilled IT personnel, better scalability, to mention only a few.
When it comes to ECM solutions, the trend is not very different. According to a survey carried out by AIIM in June 2014, 47% of the researched companies already have their ECM system in the cloud or in a hybrid of on-premises and cloud. 37% are planning to use the cloud in the future.
But how to decide if the cloud is the right place for your content?
To answer this question, you need a clear Information Governance strategy, with directions to help your organization comply with regulations, reduce risk and provide your workforce with efficient tools. Some aspects it might cover are:
- Who can access your records and documents, within and outside the organization.
- How long information needs to be maintained.
- When and how it should be destroyed.
- How audit records are kept, what needs to be audited.
- What happens when disaster strikes, what is the recovery plan.
- These criteria directly impact on the cloud deployment choice.
The private cloud gives you total control over the information security and privacy, making it the best choice for mission-critical content. The public cloud, on the other hand, has operational advantages. It may be a good choice in terms of cost, since you usually pay only for what you use. It provides better resource scalability, accommodating demand peaks without compromising the user experience. Also, it can be a fantastic tool to offer solutions to a mobile workforce and to connect to vendors and partners outside the firewall.
The hybrid cloud can potentially provide the best of both worlds. It allows the sensitive data to be held on-premises or in the private cloud, while still taking advantage of the public cloud benefits.
In order to have a successful hybrid cloud experience, it's important to be aware of some challenges that can raise. User management, access controls and encryption become fundamentally important security factors to consider. Some workloads will run in the private and the public clouds, thus user management policies need to be thought about to make it possible and secure. From the operational standpoint, tools need to be in place for application monitoring and billing management. Moreover, a robust network connection is essential.
The bottom line is: the cloud is a technological revolution and is here to stay. It still needs a few years to achieve a mature state, and as such it should be implemented with care. But, if properly deployed, it is a very good candidate to be the right place for your content.