The single best way to future-proof your organization

History has shown – and recent events have proven – there’s almost nothing more certain than uncertainty. Revolution looms around every corner – technological, cultural, societal, political – and the winds of change are entirely unpredictable. 

When you’re responsible for the continued success of an organization, that’s an uneasy reality. If it’s impossible to predict what’s coming next, how do you plan for the future?

If you charge too aggressively in one direction with no escape route, you risk choosing incorrectly and finding yourself unable to course-correct. If you wait too long for clues to present themselves, you risk being too late to catch up with the competition who made quicker business moves. 

So how do you fortify your organization against inevitable future revolutions that – if left unaddressed – would threaten to destroy it entirely? 

By putting your people, processes and priorities in a position of true agility.

Take your mission, vision and values – the things you stand for and the importance you place on meeting expectations of the people you serve – and place them as the unchanging center of nimble operations that can pivot as needs evolve. 

Structure your operations so that if you needed to make a major, immediate change in the way you work, you could do so. This structure allows you to stay true to who you are while being able to pivot quickly to whatever your customers and the market require. 

And the best way to do that? Content services in the cloud. 

Understanding the risks of stagnation

No matter how robust your content services solution is, no matter how perfectly configured, it is undeniably limited by on-premises hosting. In fact, by continuing to host your content services solution on-prem, you may be putting your entire organization at risk.

At worst, this could look like a total loss of data and system configuration due to natural or physical disaster. A car crashes into your server room or a tornado destroys the building? There go your systems and everything stored within. 

More commonly, the risks posed by on-premises delivery are less obvious. So unremarkable you might think that’s just the way things are everywhere. Let’s test it out: do any of these challenges sound familiar?

Challenge: Our systems feel outdated. 
Risk: Because it’s difficult to manually keep up-to-date with new versions, features and patches, on-prem solutions are often running a few steps behind. This means less-than-ideal user experience, increased security risk and degrading ROI for your investment.

Challenge: It takes forever for IT to fix or implement anything.
Risk: Because your IT team has to make these updates manually, they’re overloaded and your systems are under-supported. There isn’t enough manpower to keep up with the fluid demands of the business and diversity of technology. Plus, with tech workers in high demand, this unsustainable, unnecessary workload may have your IT employees looking for work elsewhere.

Challenge: Expectations change so quickly, and we can’t keep up.
Risk: Because market conditions and tech capabilities shift so frequently and unpredictably, it’s nearly impossible to change direction as fast as you need to. That means you’ll end up falling behind the competition that’s able to adapt at the speed of business.

Challenge: If something happened to our servers, it would take a lot of time and effort for us to recover.
Risk: On-prem hosting usually equates to inadequate disaster recovery protocols, controls, documentation and resources. That increases your risk of data loss and disruption of operations. It also makes disaster recovery and business continuity a terrifying prospect.

Challenge: It’s tough to know if our sensitive data is actually secure.
Risk: Because you have to manually keep up with ever-changing cybersecurity threats, privacy regulations and access control, you’re at major risk of data breaches and fines.

Here’s some good news: You don’t have to work that way.

Every one of those challenges can be mitigated or eliminated by migrating your content services to the cloud. Because at their cores, each of these challenges stems from a lack of agility.

Your on-prem solution isn’t nimble, which means the people supporting it can’t address problems quickly or take action on real-time decisions, so you aren’t able to meet expectations at the speed expected of you. You’re stuck.

Hosting your content services solutions in the cloud is now far and away the smartest choice and the only way to keep pace as the world of business continues to digitally transform.

Want to accelerate your digital transformation? “Accelerate” isn’t really in the vocabulary of an on-prem system.

But in the cloud, your content services solution is a natural conduit for digital transformation. It provides increased access to systems and information from anywhere, and gives your organization the flexibility and agility to move ahead of the speed of business.

Content services in the cloud means more than that, too. It means information stored securely and reliably with 99.99% uptime and backup redundancy for disaster recovery. It means more engaged, empowered employees and more responsive customer experience.

And at Hyland, organizations operating in the Hyland Cloud get the quickest, easiest access to upgrades, new features and compliance initiatives. That means you always get the best of what our solutions have to offer – making the Hyland Cloud the key to maximizing your investment in content services. Plus, Hyland Cloud migration pays for itself in less than six months, and represents $2.79 M in net present value over just three years.

The “speed of business” never slows down

You may think, now that business is returning to a more recognizable rhythm, it’s safe to put a cloud migration initiative on your five-year plan. But business never stops evolving and the future is unpredictable, which means the time to migrate is now.

Right now, cloud migration will facilitate your management of the lingering pandemic, your remote work and any return-to-work initiatives on the horizon. No matter what comes next, a content services platform in the cloud can accommodate your ideal reaction to the circumstances.

Begin where you are

The best way to save money and increase value is to invest in what you already have. It’s true of physical belongings, it’s true of employees and it’s especially true of software solutions.

Often, companies identify an opportunity to improve their processes and go searching for a new tool to address it.

And more often still, the entire process is unnecessary. The research, vetting, decision by committee, due diligence, implementation, training, change management and not to mention the costs of the solution itself add up to millions of dollars and months of effort when a solution was right in front of their faces all along. It’s time to face the future with agility and confidence.

It’s time for the Hyland Cloud.

You might also like: 

• Understanding the risk of legacy ECM
• The future of ECM 
• Understanding cloud computing for nontechnical professionals