Many people think that they can use Box, DropBox and Google Drive for their document management needs but they are incorrect. These sites were not made to be document management software but instead a place to store and share your files. Real DM software has many more features that businesses need to make their lives easier and to save time and money. This presentation will show you why these sites are not giving you all the benefits you need and what you can do to fix that. Find out more at http://www.contentverse.com

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The advantages of the cloud are rich as a software
delivery model, but the core functionality of many
cloud platforms is still pretty anemic when compared
to their on-premise counterparts — a deficiency that’s
readily apparent in the area of enterprise document
management.
Consumer-oriented cloud file sharing services such as
Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive are trying to nudge their
latest offerings towards an enterprise customer base,
positioning their tools as an easy way for business users
to share and collaborate on documents and files. While
the relative simplicity and initial low cost of entry for
these cloud-based file sharing services has a certain
curb appeal, they don’t stack up in a deep dive, feature-
to-feature comparison with traditional document
management platforms that have been built from the
ground up to address enterprise-class functionality from
security to business process efficiencies.

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Many ECM customers, while interested in the cloud, still
have major reservations about moving critical business
documents to an environment they consider questionably
secure. According to a study by the Association for
Information and Image Management (AIIM), 41% of
businesses surveyed said they saw the cloud in their
future at some point within the next couple of years,
but they still had considerable doubts, with 61% of
respondents specifically citing concerns about security.
On-premise document management remains the
dominant deployment model for a variety of reasons,
according to research by Gartner and Forrester. They
found corporate users to be wary of making a switch to
cloud-based systems because of existing infrastructure
investments, growing compliance requirements, and
on-going governance mandates, none of which are
adequately addressed by the current crop of new
offerings.
“...61% of respondents specifically
cited concerns about security.”
“41% of businesses said they
saw the cloud in their future...”

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Security at all costs
There’s an on-going debate over how secure or
unsecure the cloud is, but the bottom line is that
business customers can’t afford — nor do they want —
a shred of ambiguity when it comes down to protecting
critical information assets. Particularly for those highly-
regulated industries like legal and financial, all the
claims surrounding world-class data centers do little to
drown out real concerns that call for a layered security
approach that starts at a base level of password
protection and individual access rights to file encryption,
audit trails, notifications, and image-level security.
Five reasons
why cloud file sharing platforms can’t touch
document management platforms from an
enterprise functionality standpoint: Security at
all costs
Document
Storage and
Beyond
Not yet ready
for primetime
Migration
issues
Performance
concerns
Document storage and beyond
Cloud file sharing services might be adept at basic
file storage and retrieval, but they offer limited, if any,
functionality in many of the areas that are the sweet
spot for document management software. Specifically,
traditional enterprise document management systems
have extensive, built-in automated workflow capabilities
for routing documents and supporting key business
processes, particularly in the areas of compliance and
records retention.
Moreover, support for capabilities like annotations
and redactions, esignatures, integration with business
line applications, sophisticated search across multiple
databases, and the ability to view any file format without
having the native application are other benefits of
on-premises systems that aren’t universally supported
by cloud-based file sharing solutions.

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Migration issues
What happens if the online file sharing service doesn’t
work out as anticipated or the business need outstrips
its capabilities? Not only is figuring out how to migrate
all those documents a giant headache, but there are
likely hidden costs related to such a migration. These
costs are often not discussed or revealed at the onset of
a subscription contract, thus the customer doesn’t have
a true picture of what’s at stake until they actually try to
move a large database of files to another platform.
Not yet ready for primetime
The cloud is still relatively in its infancy and so too are
the products and the providers. Traditional ECM players
are well-established veterans with stability and longevity
in the market, and their offerings have known reliability
in terms of being able to hold up to enterprise demands.
In contrast, online file sharing services have not yet
demonstrated an ability to handle the requirements and
scale required by corporate users.
Performance concerns
This is the Internet after all, thus there can be
performance bottlenecks related to searching and
retrieving documents, depending on a variety of issues,
from available bandwidth to the number of users and
geographic location. Because the Internet is also
a streaming technology, enterprises can encounter
problems trying to retrieve large numbers of documents
with large image sizes — a limitation that doesn’t exist
with on-premises document management systems.
The Verdict
The cloud may have many merits as a software delivery
platform, but due diligence is required to evaluate
whether an individual cloud service can touch the range
of functionality offered by a traditional on-premise
system. Easy-to-use and quick to deploy is no substitute
for limited functionality — a factor many businesses are
quickly discovering as they look under the covers of
online file sharing services.

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