How to Move your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to the Cloud

You may not be considering a move to managing content in the cloud today, but one thing is for sure: you’re going to have to move to the cloud — and probably sooner than you think! Planning that journey is a critical component of any IM technology strategy.

There are two approaches when moving to the cloud. You can either invest in a cloud-native Content Services Platform or move your current systems to a private cloud infrastructure or a public cloud infrastructure like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Regarding private cloud infrastructures, many organizations opt for a hybrid of either the public cloud infrastructure and the private cloud or the public cloud mixed with an on-premises solution.

If you’re interested in moving on-premises solutions to the cloud, the “lift and shift” approach is an option, which is a strategy offering a fast-track to the cloud’s value. This approach delivers little to no disruption to your organization. However, most legacy systems are not designed to be delivered via the cloud, limiting your ability to customize and optimize them. Making changes to a complex legacy system that is running in a container, running on the cloud, is not trivial. And finally, legacy systems do not scale efficiently in a cloud environment, meaning operating costs often spiral as demands increase.

Benefits of Moving your ECM to the Cloud

• Microservices provide enterprise architects with a defined framework to build on further. A microservices-enabled ECM solution can integrate into other microservices, providing a future-proof platform to incorporate new tools and technologies as they become available.
• Cloud services provide rapid innovation at lower costs, valuable insights from information, infrastructure modernization, and more. You also can’t beat its agility and scale, which rapidly changing business requires.
• Organizations that are used to paying ahead of time for services can now utilize a Subscription Pricing model and pay for only what they use with cloud services: no more solution license, hardware, or implementation costs. We do need to point out that if you opt for a cloud-enabled legacy solution over a cloud-native platform, at some point, the costs associated with deploying in the cloud will eventually exceed the principal investment.
• Elastic scaling means that cloud services can grow, or shrink, to deliver just the right amount of processing power to meet the specific needs of an ECM system at any given time. And a cloud-native, federated solution removes the challenge of silos of information, connecting these systems and providing end-users a “single source of truth,” no matter where data is stored.

Now that you’ve evaluate your ECM systems in place, the systems migration risks, and right now the Cloud possibilities, what will you do next?