Until recently, on-premises enterprise content management (ECM) was standard procedure for most businesses. In recent years, the number of organizations deploying cloud-based services has increased drastically, with sources indicating that around 85% of enterprises will adopt a cloud-first mentality by 2025.
Not only do cloud-based solutions offer greater business agility, flexibility, and the ability to adapt to evolving business requirements, a cloud-native approach also eliminates in-house technical maintenance, freeing up valuable time and resources to focus on core business activities. Adopting a cloud-first ECM strategy removes the constraints of costly, inefficient legacy infrastructures and outdated applications to help organizations innovate, scale, and remain competitive in today’s digital landscape.
Better Collaboration & Productivity
Cloud-first enterprise content management enhances productivity in a variety of ways. Utilizing a cloud-first infrastructure presents the opportunity to consolidate and integrate disparate business systems and applications for streamlined content access and more effective collaboration — in real time. Whether team members are in the same building or thousands of miles apart, the cloud offers online access from anywhere, and connects users with tools that promote seamless collaboration and communication, enhancing productivity across the organization.
The cloud makes managing business data a much simpler process by centralizing information online and enabling users to access content from any device, anywhere. From remote access and real-time collaboration, to integrated data backup and restore options, adopting a cloud-first ECM system can help streamline business processes company-wide.
Increased Scalability & Flexibility
When businesses manage their applications and data on-premises, effectively scaling to meet evolving business needs or growing amounts of data and information can be complex for even the most competent IT teams. More often than not, the result is shadow IT, content chaos, and information silos — all of which hamper productivity.
On-premise updates can be expensive too, often requiring infrastructure redesigns, added IT labor, and costly equipment upgrades. A cloud-first strategy not only opens the door for more scalability, but also saves time and resources, and ensures organizations will have sufficient data storage to adapt to ever-evolving business needs.
Work From Anywhere
Enabling remote work is a growing priority for many businesses, which has only been exacerbated over the past years as organizations learned to pivot in a global pandemic. Adopting a cloud-first approach gives remote workers 24/7 access to the information they need to do their jobs. Additionally, the cloud makes it easier to control user permissions and configure granular access to specific resources. Administrators can set secure user permissions and governance policies to ensure that employees have easy access to the required information, while simultaneously thwarting any unauthorized access attempts or security threats.
Enhanced Security & Compliance
When it comes to an organization’s most valuable asset—its data—it’s important to make sure it remains safe, secure, and accessible. Managing business information and operations in the cloud enables security to be at the forefront, offering hardened security controls and proven infrastructure far beyond what most enterprises can achieve with on-premise solutions.
In fact, studies show that 94% of businesses see an improvement in security after adopting a cloud-first approach, and 91% said the cloud makes it easier to meet industry compliance requirements. Transitioning from an on-premise solution to the cloud allows companies to benefit from advanced security protocols and automatic software updates, ensuring sensitive data is secure and enforced with the latest protection.
Cost Savings
Businesses are all focused on the bottom line, and one of the major benefits of a cloud-first strategy is the financial savings it produces. Building, managing, and scaling legacy hardware and software is expensive enough. When you factor in the costs of hosting and managing applications and servers internally, things really begin to add up. These practices will also require a significant amount of planning, time, and resources.
Organizations that adopt a cloud-based ECM solution generally see a reduction in hosting costs, equipment, licensing, and labor costs. Cloud services often operate on a pay-as-you-consume basis, which allows for greater flexibility as organizations scale up or down and removes certain upfront investment requirements. On top of this, organizations experience a reduction in maintenance and other overhead costs that would traditionally come with using on-premise solutions and physical servers.
Time to Make the Move
Cloud-first enterprise content management is no longer an aspirational innovation, but an imperative investment in the move towards complete digital transformation. Organizations must view the cloud as an opportunity to streamline business operations and keep up with industry norms and requirements.
But deciding to move to the cloud is only the first step. Once you’ve identified your ideal cloud-based infrastructure, you need to establish a clear migration plan, adopt the right tools to undertake the transition.
Fast2 simplifies the entire migration process and offers out-of-the-box connectors to streamline migration from legacy ECM systems to the cloud. The migration solution is designed to quickly and securely migrate up to billions of documents for organizations of any size and industry, for an accelerated legacy transformation with minimal business impact.
Aging on-premise solutions lack the agility and breadth of services that modern enterprises require. So, get your migration process started the right way and reach out to Fast2 today!
Learn more about ECM migration