As organizations steadily migrate content to the cloud, their focus should shift to content services.
It’s no longer sufficient to simply manage and store content. To achieve true business value, organizations must deliver the right content quickly and securely into the right hands at the right time in order to achieve true business value.
Doing so increases productivity, improves decision-making and provides better customer experiences. A seamless content services approach also moves digital transformation goals forward while improving IT operations.
The cloud plays a significant role in achieving these goals, while also accomplishing economies of scale. IDG Research conducted a survey among 50 IT and business executives across all industries and company sizes in order to better understand how this is playing out in terms of content services. Among the results: 58 percent of enterprises say they’re migrating content to the cloud.
Yet to attain the business and IT benefits they seek, organizations must go a step further and adopt a cloud-based content services strategy, which includes capabilities that integrate and take advantage of enterprise-wide content from solutions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Perspectives on Managing Content
Respondents are familiar with the concepts of enterprise content management (ECM), content services, enterprise information management and content management services. Roughly one-third to 40 percent of the IDG survey respondents say they are using at least one of these solutions.
There’s also widespread use of secure file-sharing applications to manage content. Almost two-thirds of IT leaders say these apps are either in production in a business unit or used enterprise-wide, or they have existing deployments that are being upgraded. Another 22 percent are piloting new file-sharing initiatives.
Yet despite employing these types of solutions, organizations cite several challenges when it comes to managing content, including:
- Security (60 percent)
- IT operations (54 percent)
- Regulatory compliance and risk management (46 percent)