Cloud content management: Fuel for powering digital transformation

Companies are adopting cloud content management to support secure, collaborative, and efficient digital workplaces and to automate the content-driven processes that power their businesses.

Content serves as the fuel that powers virtually all business operations in today’s modern enterprise. And there’s no shortage of it, given the explosion of data-generating systems and activities, along with the growing ability to store and process once-unimaginable volumes of data.

But this data deluge brings challenges: Much of the information that enterprises are generating is unstructured, making it difficult to clean and analyze. What’s more, aging and overburdened enterprise content management (ECM) systems can’t support the unified, efficient, and highly secure content-based processes that businesses require.

Fortunately, data-dependent organizations can tap a solution that will meet their needs both today and tomorrow: Cloud content management (CCM). By centralizing and rationalizing information and storing it in the cloud, CCM eliminates data silos and provides a single source of truth for information. This information, in turn, supports efficient collaboration, processes, and workflows across the enterprise and its many data-powered applications.

Fragmented data landscape

To stay relevant and competitive, companies have no choice but to transform. But first they must overcome two fundamental challenges of modern information:

• Data fragmentation and variability. Unstructured content makes up anywhere from 80% to 90% of the data within most organizations, according to Gartner. This content is often saved in a wide variety of file formats; resides in multiple applications and data stores; and is duplicated, out-of-date, or otherwise unreliable
• Discrete and unintegrated content management systems. Most organizations use multiple systems for content management. These can include file shares, email, and physical media; ECM systems; consumer file sync and share tools; line-of-business (LOB) applications; and/or software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps

This fragmented content ecosystem contributes to increased security and compliance risks as well as inefficient and inflexible business processes that are ill-suited to changing needs and real-time business demands.