IDG Enterprise rightfully referred to cloud computing as “the technology powerhouse” in its 2015 Cloud Computing Survey, in which 56% of organizations surveyed are actively pursuing new opportunities to deploy cloud-based applications. 72% have at least one application in the cloud already; virtually all other companies surveyed (27%) plan to do so.
The survey also reported the #1 business objective among enterprise organizations that is driving exploration and investment in cloud computing is replacing on-premises legacy technologies (48%). Most other anticipated benefits are performance related, such as improving customer services, reducing waste and better reacting to changing market conditions. Achieving these goals help organizations achieve a true digital workplace.
It is critical for organizations to replace the legacy centralized “command and control” approach to business applications with new technology and tools that empower workers, managers and global work teams to quickly and easily access, share and collaborate on key digital assets on demand, anytime, anywhere.
Unfortunately, if companies are not careful with their cloud platform vendor selections, they may find these expected benefits still out of their reach, having merely replaced on-premises legacy technology with off-premises legacy technology.
Software vendors, including those within the digital asset management system and Enterprise Content Management system (ECM) space, are increasingly referring to their software as a “cloud platform”, when in reality they are offering their same legacy platforms that have merely been retrofitted to run on virtual machines, hosted in the cloud. This may allow vendors to make a surface-level claim of cloud functionality, but it cannot deliver customers the benefits and efficiencies of cloud computing they were seeking in the first place.
This practice has become so frustrating to customers and industry observers that the term cloudwashing is increasingly used to describe it. It is similar in meaning to the term greenwashing, used to describe companies that portray their products as environmentally-friendly when they really aren’t to any meaningful degree, if at all. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benihoff used the term in a recent interview, saying, “There has been a great cloudwashing, where every company says they are the cloud…There are a lot of false clouds out there.”
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ow can companies avoid cloud washing? Instead of cloud-hosted platforms, organizations should look for cloud-native platforms that have been built from the ground up for the cloud, with a flexible and agile infrastructure, REST API integrations, high availability, scalability and built-in security, capable of immediate deployment to cloud infrastructures like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Only a cloud-native platform for enterprise digital asset management can provide an API-first development environment to rapidly build, test, deploy and maintain key business applications and make the digital workplace an exciting new reality for organizations. Nuxeo’s cloud-native content platform makes this possible!
Read more about Nuxeo on AWS in this whitepaper.