Call it what you will Document Management, Enterprise Content Management or Content Services, the cloud has all the advantages over on-premise as a cloud subscription typically provides all of the functionality that is la carte with an on-premise instance. Also cloud removes the infrastructure hardware and maintenance requirements of an on-premise system. This is not to say that there are not draw backs with cloud.

One fallacy I’ll dispel is the security concern. I would all but guarantee your network does not have nearly the protection of the big data centers who are hosting these services.

Next of course is the complete reliance on your Internet connection. I always recommend redundancy in that area to remove the single point of failure. Also, unless you have a huge instance which may afford you dedicated hardware for most of us it will a shared environment. If not provisioned and administered well there is the potential for issues. Pound for pound I’ll still take and recommend the cloud

Content services, and content service platforms have been around for a long time. They were not always called that, but the functionality, to a greater or lesser extent, was available through enterprise content management (ECM) systems. However, as anyone who follows the ECM space knows, Gartner put a nail in the that coffin in 2017 when Michael Woodbridge predicted the ‘death of ECM’, even if, in practical terms for organizations little changed.

“ECM is now dead (kaput, finite, an ex-market name),” Woodbridge wrote, “at least in how Gartner defines the market. It’s been replaced by the term Content Services, a strategic concept that covers three aspects, namely Content Services Applications, Platforms and Components.”

Since then — that is for the past three years — Gartner has renamed its Magic Quadrant for ECM as Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms (CSP). The most recent one (registration required) was published late last month.

In it, Gartner points out that buyers of CSP technology now have many options that can enable them to truly implement an enterprise vision of content services. Advances in federation, intelligence, cloud deployment and user experience mean that the market provides a more modernizing set of capabilities than ever before. Read On: