7 Reasons to Migrate to Cloud Document Management Systems

As the world grows increasingly more digital, many businesses are beginning to seek out the cloud to solve their challenges with remote work, digital demand, growth and increased costs.

While document processing and management is already a complicated task, it becomes twice as challenging when it needs to be done remotely using an on-premise legacy system. Buying, maintaining, scaling, updating and training staff for on-prem systems is difficult for any business – but especially so for small and mid-sized businesses.

Thankfully, the cloud offers a better, more cost-effective way for companies to gain freedom and flexibility.

Read on to discover the 7 reasons businesses are moving away from on-premise legacy systems:

1. Lack of Scalability

On-premise applications are rigid by nature and require a lot of internal IT time, effort and money to be able to scale. You’ll need to purchase licenses, additional servers, and coders any time you want to scale up, integrate new applications, or add features. The cloud, on the other hand, is built to scale much more easily and grow virtually infinitely.

2. Limited Storage, Volume & Bandwidth

With legacy systems, you’re limited by what you already have. Gaining more volume or processing power to meet peak seasonal demands will cost you big bucks, both in software licenses, infrastructure and ongoing maintenance. Adding to on-premise systems also takes much longer for IT teams to orchestrate and set up versus simply scaling an existing cloud platform or turning on a new feature. Cloud platforms ensure that you’re saving both time and money, by only paying for what you’re using.

3. Tedious Maintenance & Upgrades

When you own the infrastructure, every update, service and upgrade is on you. Both costs and effort. With a cloud provider, they shoulder all the maintenance and management for you, relieving huge headaches and expenses.

4. Limited Access

On-premise legacy systems are not designed for anywhere access. Typically, you will need to be within the company environment, on a company device to access content. However, with cloud storage and retrieval, users can easily upload and access any content simply by logging into a browser. Plus, users can securely access on the go using other devices such as a mobile phone or a tablet.

5. Lower Performance

Due to their rigidity, on-prem solutions have lower data visibility and reduced speed between on-prem and cloud applications. This lack of speed and visibility can greatly affect your team’s ability to make business decisions. Cloud platforms, on the hand, offer easier interaction and communication among business communities due to high data visibility and more seamless integration between cloud applications.

6. Aging Security

On-premise solutions require manual check-in, updates and service by your IT team. Accidentally missing an update could place your business in jeopardy. Additionally, most on-premise solutions today are comprised of multiple pieces of aging technology, opening up increased opportunity for breaches. Research has shown that data stored in the cloud is often more secure than on-premise centers, due to greater resources and fewer chances for user error.^{1, 2} This is because most cloud platforms offer automatic security updates and have several IT experts monitoring infrastructure around-the-clock.

7. Business Continuity Risk

Uptime is crucial. Most businesses using on-prem solutions mitigate their risk by building additional resources for disaster recovery. However, this strategy can be costly and not entirely reliable. Conversely, storing data in the cloud is a simple and cost-effective way to ensure reliable business continuity. Cloud services protect their data centers both virtually and physically, disperse centers to various geographic locations, secure outside perimeters, ensure constant power, and prevent unauthorized access, among many other protective measures.

1. Gartner. (2017). Cloud Strategy Leadership: Gartner Insights on How and Why Leaders Must Implement Cloud Computing
2. Infor. (2015). Cloud Computing: Examining the security of cloud-based vs. on-premise deployments