As companies grow, technical teams often find themselves facing resource challenges. No longer are firms contained in one building, with teams and stakeholders inside and out of the corporate structure. As more offices are opened, and more employees are engaged in a hybrid or entirely remote situation, application and IT administrators are dealing with multiple concerns in providing enough support, and scale their capacity to meet the needs of the business.
In short, they must engage in a strategy of digital transformation.
There are a number of options when determining how best to transform the deployment of digital resources to provide the needed technical resources. Some applications are managed internally, while in other cases more functions are moved off-site to remote datacenters, or to a massively-distributed cloud platform. The hybrid-cloud model is often less a determined strategy, but rather an unavoidable outcome. In most cases, keeping all of the data and content in-house is diminishing as a possibility.
Managing Potential Pitfalls
There are three primary concerns that IT teams – and business leaders by extension – must face:
The first concern administrators face when migrating their data to the cloud is a loss of security mechanisms. No longer is their data protected behind a phalanx of firewalls. This often creates a sort of technical anxiety that is unfounded.
While threats have always been present with data storage on- and off-premise, there is an additional mitigation factor when hosting data in a remote, distributed environment. Server redundancy protects against data loss or encryption attacks, and larger engineering teams are able to work more effectively to address code vulnerabilities and maintain uptime.
Compare this with a server hosted in-house or in a single remote datacenter, where a smaller team is tasked with maintaining patch updates and ensuring constant availability of power and connectivity. Migrating from a single location to the cloud reduces overall risk while providing a broader team of people with the resources to mitigate attacks.
However, the benefits of a cloud platform go well beyond processing. In truth, migration to a cloud content platform can reduce the cost of resource management in terms of both finances and time. Faster application performance helps teams complete important tasks more efficiently. Centralized support can help administrators maintain upgrades and updates that propagate to each location and enhance the user experience consistently and immediately.
That brings us to the third concern, which is perhaps the most critically important: knowledge-sharing. Storing important business content and application data on the cloud allows more associates to find items more quickly and easily, and standardizes access protocols. This allows users to maintain documents and tasks, and share the most up-to-date information with colleagues everywhere. It also allows administrators and managers to track the use of resources across global teams.
Deploying cloud content ensures that your company will keep your teams on a level playing field whether learning your finance or sales procedures, understanding your product messaging, receiving HR or legal training, or any other facet of your business that needs to be shared with team members wherever they are. The cloud supports the applications you will need to store and protect documents, optimize version control, and analyze any resource inconsistencies.
At Intellective, we work with several cloud content platforms and partners like Box for storing enterprise content, to help customers pursue a digital transformation strategy, so they can address these concerns and provide the benefits to their users, no matter where they are.