Is There a Cloud in Your Content Management Forecast?

Jan 07 -

Sorry, I couldn’t avoid the cliche title.  It seems nobody can.  It’s safe to say that no recent technology term has infiltrated our vocabulary so quickly and abundantly.  Everywhere you look, companies are offering products and services in “the cloud”.

Some companies, like Salesforce or Google, were entirely in the cloud long before we started calling it “the cloud”.  Other companies have reinvented products to take advantage of the cloud.  New products and services have sprung up because of its flexibility.    

“The Cloud” has the allure of being a familiar phrase.  It’s an easy analogy. Everyone knows what clouds are.  Clouds can be beautiful or threatening. Clouds can be light or dark, high or low and can provide shade from the sun.  Clouds even carry water, the basic building block of life.  Real clouds are versatile, and the term “The Cloud” is one of the most versatile technology terms to date.  It can mean different things to different people.  There’s cloud computing, cloud storage cloud data, cloud services and platforms to name a few.  When companies add cloud to their vocabulary, it means at some level they are taking advantage of one or more of these new ways of doing things.

But like real clouds, it’s rare to find two “clouds” exactly alike.  If you look at the cloud as merely replacing pieces of physical hosting infrastructure, then you’re only getting half the picture.  Sure, at the very least, if your IT department can save money and require fewer resources, moving components to the cloud will accomplish that goal.

The value proposition of the cloud gives deployment options at every level, not just a place to virtualize a formerly physical server.  A true cloud integration takes advantage of many of the cloud options, including storage, computing, DNS and load balancing.  Plus,  it is built to scale using repeatable best practices and powerful API’s.  This means quicker deployments with repeatable tasks which can save valuable time and money when your requirements or usage patterns change.

So if you’re a marketer who wants to fully own your website, then you should align yourself with a team that can capitalize on everything the cloud has to offer.  Moving to a service like CommonSpot Cloud means tapping into best practices and easily duplicated steps done by the people who know it best.  Once you’re there, it can mean being self-sufficient and not having to rely on your IT department for everything.  Go to market faster and feel more independent in the process.  Then, you and your IT counterpart can focus on doing the things you do best.

What’s more, a simple way of telling if clouds are in your forecast is to look at it this way.  Anything you consume outside your firewall can be considered cloud.  So you may already be “in the cloud” with some of your day to day software.  And if so, your IT department has implicitly or specifically determined that there are already services that can be better provided in the cloud.  Why should your CMS be any different?