Cloud for Enterprise Content Management: Pros and Cons for Document Management
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, in general, 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 allow you a perspective before determining the most suitable document management option for your company.
On-Premises Document Management
On-premises document management involves hosting the system within your organisation's infrastructure. This grants you complete control over hardware, software, security protocols, and most importantly, over your operational costs. On-premises infrastructure is the traditional approach that appeals to certain businesses with hyper-specific regulatory requirements and a preference for in-house management.
Pros:
Enhanced Control: With on-premises solutions, you have direct control over the document management environment, enabling tailored configurations and security measures.
Compliance Confidence: Industries with strict compliance requirements usually find on-premises solutions are more accommodating, providing full control of data and documents, stored within the company and country (data protection regulators).
Cons:
Bigger Upfront Investment: Implementing on-premises solutions often requires a substantial upfront investment for the hardware, software application licenses, and infrastructure.
Maintenance Responsibility: Administration, ongoing maintenance, updates, patches, and troubleshooting is still the responsibility of your company's in-house IT department. The team should be trained regularly to keep the system running and serve its purpose efficiently. Certain aspects or tasks of on-premise solutions could be outsourced to a service provider.
Cloud-Based Document Management in General
Cloud-based document management leverages remote servers and cloud computing services. It offers flexibility, scalability, and accessibility for enterprises, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to streamline operations and reduce upfront costs with an enterprise cloud model.
Pros:
Nothing on Your Premises: No hardware, no software, no operations.
Scalability and Flexibility: Cloud-based solutions in general allow for easy scalability and flexibility. They're adaptable to most, if not all, businesses' changing needs without the need for a large upfront investment.
Accessibility: If need be, documents in cloud infrastructure are accessible from anywhere at any time with just an internet connection. This accessibility enhances productivity, communication, and collaboration among remote teams.
Disaster Recovery (DR): Cloud-based solutions offer Disatser Recovery features that leverage geographically dispersed resources to provide solid, scalable, and flexible solutions for maintaining service continuity and data integrity in the face of various unforeseen incidents or disasters.
Security and Data Protection: The security standards like AWS, Google, and Microsoft offer in their Data Centre are not accessible to staff and/or budget.
Cons:
Dependency on Service Providers: Cloud-based solutions heavily rely on external service providers. Meaning, all document management system's availability is contingent on the cloud environment infrastructure and performance.
Subscription Costs: While cloud solutions are cost-effective, in the long run, subscription costs accumulate — especially for larger enterprises. Roll-outs in the company may become less desired because of the exponentially increased costs of public cloud usage. Companies with large volumes of data would benefit less from public clouds and more from enterprise cloud solutions based on cost and capabilities, such as handling data, security, and provision for customisation.
Potentially Limited Functionally: One-size-fits-all tools that lack enterprise cloud strategy and features may have functional limitations that suit some businesses but not others.
Unpredictable Costs: Most public cloud suppliers charge for so-called transactional volume, or the amount of data stored in the cloud services' data storage and the count of accesses to it annually. Miscalculations and underestimation in the beginning regarding volume and growth rate of access per year can be fatal and significantly influence the annual costs of a public cloud subscription.
Note: Distributed cloud encompasses both public and private cloud services that are spread across multiple geographic locations managed as a single entity. It helps bring cloud computing resources closer to where data is generated and used, improving latency, compliance, and performance.
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Public Cloud
A public cloud is a type of computing where resources are offered by a third-party provider via the Internet and are shared by organisations and individuals who want to use or purchase them.
Pros:
Public cloud services are multi-tenant environments (multiple enterprises and organizations under one environment) that allow cheaper rates to end-customers
Limited individual configuration allows cheaper rates for end-customer
Scalable about your needs (CPU, RAM, storage space)
Pay-what you use (increase or decrease the number of licenses)
Fully managed environment
Subscription model: lower entry costs
Public cloud architecture subscription usually comes with fixed fees over 3-5 years
Software is automatically updated with recurring improvements and bug fixes
One-stop-shopping (no worries about hardware, DB, Storage, backups, etc.)
Cons:
Subscription with fixed fees over 3 to 5 years (no possibility of benefitting from falling prices and/or discounts)
The multi-tenant environment is not accepted for strictly confidential data
Limited individual functionality and configuration available with public cloud providers
Normally every 3 months update of application software with new functions and features, even the design will confuse end-users, which leads to being unable to use it in regulated industry processes.
Private Cloud
Differentiation between System Environment Support and Application Support
Pros:
Single tenant environment - All enterprise confidential data are isolated and kept on private clouds inaccessible to other companies
Private cloud platforms allow more individual requirements, customization, and configurations
Cloud updates on-demand and under your complete control
More flexibility in choosing a service provider
Moving data from one service provider to another (if needed) is easier than escaping from a full-service public cloud computing resources
Cons:
No one-stop shopping
Individuality on higher costs
Frequently Asks Questions (FAQs)
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Cloud ECM offers solid security protection with encryption, access controls, and regular audits. While data breaches can't be entirely prevented, Cloud ECM providers (or referred to as vendors) invest heavily in expansion and reinforcements to keep up with the potential threats and to keep them at bay.
On the other hand, although on-premises systems offer more physical control and equivalent security, they require significant upfront costs and costly ongoing maintenance.
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There's no one-size-fits-all pricing for Cloud ECMs as service costs may vary depending on factors like per-user fees, subscription type, storage, and unlockable features through in-app purchases. However, you can refer to one of our experts for Iseo Solutions' updated Cloud ECM pricing when you click here.
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Yes. Cloud ECM systems can easily integrate with other business applications (like CRM and ERP) via APIs or connectors. *These integrations allow for data sharing and process automation, improving efficiency and accuracy. For example, ECM can validate data against ERP records, ensuring data consistency.
How to Make the Right Choice?
When choosing between on-premises and cloud-based (public or private cloud infrastructure) document management, the decision should be driven by a comprehensive understanding of your organisation's requirements, volume, and growth rates of access per year.
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Thomas Dreier, Principal Business Consultant at IseoSolutions
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