Delivering Instant ECM – OnDemand

By Chris Preston, senior director at EMC Corporation

When it comes to moving ECM to the Cloud there exists a fair amount of trepidation and confusion with regards to security, data privacy/jurisdiction and choosing the right deployment model.

There is no escaping the overwhelming hype when it comes to the Cloud. Everywhere you go, someone has something to sell that’s now available “in the cloud.” I’m reminded of a t-shirt I once saw - “Remember when the Cloud was called the Internet?” So amidst of all of this banter, you have to ask yourself, what is truly new here and what value is it providing? What’s not in doubt is the tremendous pressure IT is under to find ways to do things better, faster and cheaper than ever before. This is especially important when you consider that today’s enterprise application projects: are usually 2x over budget; have deployment costs that are 5-15x the cost of the software; and can take 6-9 months to put into production. Not to mention that 73% of IT budgets today are committed to maintaining the existing infrastructure despite corporate edicts to prioritize IT spending on business transformation initiatives. Regardless of where you sit on the whole hype debate, the Cloud has obvious appeal when it comes to delivering flexible compute capacity, reduced operational expense and faster time to value. I feel that we’re in a similar situation with the Cloud as we were with eCommerce years ago. Once you address some of the fundamental issues (like security, legal/data protection, etc), the floodgates will open and the cloud will soon become the dominant deployment model for enterprise software.