November 11, 2022
Information is the lifeblood of every organization. But as enterprises continue to generate a massive amount of data and content, many still struggle to manage their information using the legacy ECM systems.
Traditionally, enterprises manage their content and data on-premise within their data centers. While this approach has its own merits and advantages, there are several advantages that only cloud-based systems can provide.
With businesses adopting digital transformation to become more competitive in today's digital landscape, we are seeing an unprecedented trend in migrating existing business applications and systems to the cloud. Enterprise content management (ECM) systems are no exception. Evidently, by the reports from industry analysts MarketsandMarkets, the cloud ECM industry has grown into a $34B value in 2022. This is a clear indicator that this shift will stay, and the future of ECMs is cloud.
There are good reasons for this shift. Migrating your legacy ECM system to a cloud-based one comes with a slew of advantages that many enterprises can benefit from. Here are the top nine reasons why you should consider migrating to a cloud-based ECM.
On-premises ECM solutions are usually sold with an annual license fee, making it a CAPEX expense. Regardless of which solutions you look at, the annual license fees are quite exorbitant. On the contrary, cloud ECM solutions are typically on a subscription model, which includes customer support, maintenance, and hosting fees. This allows organizations to avoid expensive upfront fees to purchase annual licenses and server hardware. The result is not only in cost saving but also moves the expense from a high initial capital expenditure to a regular operational cost.
Cloud ECM allows members of your organization to access the contents and documents anytime, anywhere, and from any supported device. The users no longer need to use a VPN to connect to a corporate intranet or any other access control mechanisms. All cloud ECM solutions come with granular access controls for each user, simplifying and streamlining the process.
Cloud ECM also has collaborative features on top of a centralized repository for all enterprise data, allowing users to quickly find information and more effectively edit, compose, and collaborate. This cuts down much of the duplicative efforts around content processes.
Data sovereignty is a costly major compliance issue for global business enterprises. Simply put, data sovereignty is about the physical storage location of data, as dictated by the laws of each country. For organizations still running their ECM systems on-prem, this requires them to build or use data centers in each country with strict data sovereignty laws so that they can be compliant.
With a cloud ECM system, managing data sovereignty becomes much easier as it enforces rules based on geographical location. Many, if not all, cloud ECM vendors offer data centers across many geographical areas so that enterprises can safely store their sensitive information in compliance with local laws. There is zero need for capital expenditures on hardware and on-prem ECM licenses for each country.
Deployment of cloud-based ECM solutions can be incredibly fast compared to on-premise ECM systems since there is no burden of purchasing hardware and setting up data center environments. Enterprises can tap into the benefits of low-code or no-code configurations within a few hours or days instead of weeks.
Maintaining a legacy on-premise ECM solution comes with a hefty price tag.
The required hardware and annual licensing fees can run up to six figures. Enterprises also need to have an IT team of specialized expertise and experience to maintain and operate the legacy ECM systems they use.
In direct contrast, cloud-based ECM solutions don't place a significant burden on businesses with the need for physical hardware and expensive annual licensing fees. All the updates, patches, and backups happen automatically, eliminating much of the IT teams' maintenance and administrative responsibilities.
It usually takes monumentally effort and a lot of patchwork to integrate legacy ECM systems with line of business (LOB) systems. Since legacy enterprise content management platforms tend to lack APIs or integration capability with more modern systems, the integration requirements and issues always give massive headaches to enterprises.
With cloud ECM solutions, integrations can be done natively or via APIs, with both cloud or on-premise services, which include other ECM systems, business process automation systems, CRMs, automated security provisioning, identity management, and more.
Migrating your legacy enterprise content management system can be painless using our proprietary software platform and managed services team of over 80 ECM developers and data engineers.
Helix International has successfully migrated over 1000 petabytes of data for 500 enterprise clients, with 100% successful project completion. With a wide range of legacy modernization services, from Done-For-You, Done-With-You, to Do-It-Yourself, we cater to the needs of every enterprise.
Our purpose-built migration software MARS has over 45 connectors and extractors for every ECM solution in the market, enabling enterprises to migrate data as they want or read and extract it on legacy ECM systems without having to migrate it completely.
Migrating from legacy systems to the cloud is an intricate and complex process. Having a good migration partner in planning and executing is crucial to a successful ECM migration project.
Massive savings in storage and compute costs. Our 500+ enterprise customers often cut their cloud bill in half or shut down entire data centers after implementing our solutions
