Is Your Enterprise CMS Ready to Move to the Cloud?

By David Roe (@druadh20) May 17, 2011

While the benefits of cloud computing have been documented in many different studies and research papers, and many companies are looking to move to the cloud to solve IT problems related to cost, ease of deployment and scalability — among others — the question as to whether they actually should is still open to debate. Nowhere is this more relevant than in enterprise content management.

The use of cloud services is still small, but increasing, according to the recent AIIM State of the ECM Industry report, with less than 3% using externally supplied clouds for content, and 6% using internal corporate clouds.

The report adds that while internal corporate cloud usage is set to double, use of outsourced corporate clouds is set to triple, particularly for smaller organizations, but there is still resistance to the use of public clouds for content and records storage.

ECM Cloud Deployments.jpg

Source: AIIM State of the ECM Industry Report

Enterprise Readiness

However, there are also dark clouds on the horizon. Recently, while Axios Systems confirmed the AIIM findings, they also showed that over 50% of IT professionals do not think their IT Service Management (ITSM) processes are mature enough to manage cloud-based services.

According to the research, 26% thought their firms were ready, while the other 23% said that they felt “unsure.” In addition 31% said that their current ITSM tool would not support the management of cloud-based services.

In non-IT terms, ITIL is about how an organization and the people within it respond to planned and unexpected variations in the environment, from outages to changes to growth.

It is important to be clear about these things as management of the cloud environment will be one of the factors that decides whether an ECM fits into the cloud or not.

They also raise issues as to whether your enterprise can manage changes to its ECM, whether your company can manage the risk, resolve incidents, manage capacity and, in the end, financially justify it all.

The ECM Challenge

Using the most recent definition of enterprise content management as outlined by AIIM, this seems like a big challenge.

AIIM defines it as:

…the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.

Then add into the mix conversion of data between various digital and traditional forms, including paper and microfilm, and you’ve quite a task.

Given the number of vendors selling ECMs at the moment and the different elements that each of them offers, on the face of it, once the data has actually been ingested, there appears be no problem with finding vendors that can provide one, or several ECM components in the cloud. But that’s different than moving a whole enterprise content management system there.

Five Cloud-ECM Considerations

Last month in a blog posting on this issue, Daniel O’Leary, VP for Global Solutions at LincWare (news, site), outlined some of the commonest problems that are raised by enterprises based on discussions he has had with clients and colleagues around LincDoc, as well having addressed them internally.