Poll Results: Document Collaboration Key Focus for Cloud Services

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Nov 29, 2011

CMSWire's poll this month asked what your top priority was for the cloud, and while some responded that they have no plans at all, document sharing and collaboration were mentioned as the top reason to go to the cloud.

Organizations in the Cloud

Our unofficial poll netted 712 responses. Here are the final results:

CMSWire November Poll

One important thing to point out is that many of our respondents aren't even thinking much about the cloud right now, even though many are saying it's critical for organizations to be thinking about how to take advantage of cloud platforms and/or services (see Deb Lavoy's great article on this: The Cloud Debate is Over).

Part of this lack of response to the cloud may be due to a couple of things:

People within orgs may already be using cloud services and not really know it.
There still seems to be confusion/differing opinions on how to best leverage the cloud.

Our tweet jam (held earlier this month) on how the cloud is shifting information management alluded to some of this, you can read the full archive for all the details.

Document Sharing & Collaboration in the Cloud

According to our poll, over 21% indicated that document sharing and collaboration was their top priority for the cloud. With the growth of cloud-based collaboration software, that doesn't seem surprising. With more people working outside the office, and often outside office hours and on a number of different devices, there's a big demand for solutions that enable people to work together without being in the same location. And this is what cloud-based document sharing and collaboration services can do.

You may be looking at Box.net, Dropbox, OpenText's new Tempo, Adobe's SendNow or maybe SharePoint in the cloud (via Office 365). Or you are looking at one of a dozen other vendors offering cloud-based document management. In any case, you have a number of options for implementing and integrating cloud-based document collaboration solutions into your organization and with your existing enterprise systems.

Integration and Private Clouds

A number of respondents indicated that they are working on getting their own private cloud infrastructure up and running. Many enterprises are dealing with some pretty big security and compliance regulations and the thought of using public clouds is a little scary.

But a cloud environment can offer significant savings, even when it's a private cloud. In addition, you'll find a number of vendors offering dedicated cloud environments to support the needs of organizations who need (or want) very secure environments.

We're also seeing the rise of hybrid cloud environments where the organization is using a public cloud for some services and integrating these services with their on-premise systems.