Cloud for ECM: Game-Changer or Pitfall?
By Thomas Dreier, Principal Business Consultant at IseoSolutions
When choosing a document management system, a major consideration is whether to host it on your own servers or in the cloud. While public cloud solutions may seem universally appealing initially, they may have functional limitations that suit some businesses but not others.
Let's explore the benefits and drawbacks of each deployment method to assist you in determining the most suitable option for your company.
On-Premises Document Management
On-premises document management involves hosting the system within your organization's infrastructure. This grants you complete control over hardware, software, and security protocols, and most importantly, over your operational costs. It's a traditional approach that appeals to businesses with specific regulatory requirements and a preference for in-house management.
Pros:
Enhanced Control: With on-premises solutions, you have direct control over your document management environment, enabling tailored configurations and security measures.
Compliance Confidence: Industries with stringent compliance requirements often find on-premises solutions that are more accommodating, providing a sense of full control of data and documents, stored within company and country (data protection regulators).
Cons:
Upfront Investment: Implementing on-premises solutions requires a significant initial investment in hardware, software licenses, and infrastructure.
Maintenance Responsibility: administration, ongoing maintenance, updates, patches and troubleshooting is still the responsibility of your in-house IT team. The team should be trained regularly to keep the system up and running and ensure actual needs will be met. Parts of this job could be outsourced to a service provider.
Cloud-Based Document Management in general
Cloud-based document management leverages remote servers and services. It offers flexibility, scalability, and accessibility, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to streamline operations and reduce upfront costs.
Pros:
Nothing on your premises: no hardware, no software, no operations.
Scalability and Flexibility: Cloud solutions allow for easy scalability, adapting to your business's changing needs without the need for substantial upfront investments.
Accessibility: Documents can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, fostering collaboration among remote teams.
Security & Data protection: security standard as e.g. AWS, Google, Microsoft are offering in their Data Center is not reachable by your own staff and budget.
Cons:
Dependency on Service Providers: Relying on external service providers means your document management system's availability is contingent on their infrastructure and performance.
Subscription Costs: While cloud solutions can be cost-effective in the long run, subscription costs can accumulate over time, especially for larger enterprises. Rollouts in the company may become less desired because exponentially increase costs of public cloud usage. Companies with initially large volumes of data would benefit less from a public cloud.
Potentially limited functionally: as one-size-fits may have functional limitations that suit some businesses but not others.
Unpredictable costs: Most public cloud suppliers charge for so-called transactional volume — the amount of data stored in their cloud and number of accesses to it per year. Wrong assumptions in the beginning regarding volume and growth rate of access per year can be fatal and influence significantly the yearly costs.
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Public Cloud
Pros:
Multi-tenant environment (multiple customers on one environment) allows cheaper offering to end-customer
Limited individual configuration allows cheaper offering to end-customer
Scalable about your needs (CPU, RAM, storage space)
Pay-what you use (increase or decrease number of licenses)
Full managed environment
Subscription model: lower entry costs
Subscription with fixed fees over 3-5 years
Software always up to date automatically with current improvements and fixes
One-stop-shopping (no worries about, hardware, DB, Storage, backups, etc.)
Cons:
Subscription with fixed fees over 3-5 years (no possibility to benefit from falling prices)
Multi-Tenant environment will be not accepted for strictly confidential data
Normally less individual functionality and configuration are available.
Normally every 3 months update of application software with new functions and features, even design will confuse end-user, what leads to be not able to use in regulated industry processes.
Private Cloud
Differentiate between System environment support and Application Support
Pros:
Single tenant environment – data divided from other companies
More individual requirements (customising, configurations)
Updates at your demands and under your control
More flexibility choosing a service provider
Moving data from one service provider to another (if needed) is easier than escaping from a full-service Public Cloud
Cons:
No one-stop-shopping
Individuality on higher costs
How to make the right choice?
When choosing between on-premises and cloud-based (private, public) document management, the decision should be driven by a comprehensive understanding of your organization's requirements, volume and growth rates of access per year.
Get started with our 60-minute free consultation to learn more!
Thomas Dreier, Principal Business Consultant at IseoSolutions
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