The biggest shift in computing is happening right in front of us. Every client we talk to has some version of ‘Cloud Next’ in their overall strategic planning. All of us are doing it now – Office 365, Workday for HR, Salesforce for sales data and more. But 100s to 1000s of systems are running internally that have enormous value to the organization. NOW WHAT?
In the less structured world of documents, contracts, statements and more – there is more of a ‘data swamp’ taking place as we look to make this cloud transition. Over the last 5 years a lot of people ‘dabbled’ in cloud services from the likes of Box and Dropbox. With that Microsoft O365 licenses come with OneDrive and SharePoint at no cost. This has resulted in older content running in the older ECM systems like IBM and OpenText while newer content is being authored and stored in a mix of cloud services. This ‘swamp’ has actually made business more complicated, risky and less effective.
You need to take a moment and realize having a standard is now more imperative than ever. And to reduce the confusion you need to know WHAT you have and WHERE it is located. This helps you then decide:
- What to keep active (and dedup, find the final version, etc)
- What to archive (and when it should be deleted)
- What to delete (if ever)
The biggest mistake of an organization is to think all they have to do is duplicate the content and processes around them in the cloud – and WALLA – they are done (generally called ‘life and shift‘). But many clients tell us conflicting answers to these answers because they don’t know what they have in the first place. Where are the opportunities in all this data but where are the risks as well.
As you consider how to make this ‘Cloud Next’ strategy work, you need to know what you have and reconcile what is next and where it should live. InfoDNA Solutions brings the focus, expertise and tools to help make the entire effort more predictable and successful. With Topla, this ability to identify what you have and place it where it should live is automated.
