When IBM acquired FileNet in 2006, it was one of the most praised enterprise content management (ECM) systems on the market. While this was, at the time, a sound IT investment and a mainstay for large enterprises operating in highly-regulated industries, the content management space has grown leaps and bounds since the age of on-premise document management. Organizations that have failed to migrate from old, outdated legacy systems implemented over a decade ago are now bearing the brunt of a limiting infrastructure that incidentally costs a pretty penny to maintain.
Legacy FileNet users have expressed concerns about the future of their ECM system and its ability (or inability) to adapt to evolving business needs. Concerns have been raised regarding the complexity of initial deployment and ongoing administration, as well as the excessive costs of system updates, backups, and IT support. As a result, the past several years have seen an increasing number of organizations migrate from legacy FileNet to the cloud. Business and IT leaders worldwide are replacing legacy, on-premises technology with flexible, scalable, and cost-effective computing power in the cloud. From reducing costs to accelerating innovation, there are many compelling reasons to embark on a cloud migration journey. This blog explores six key reasons why organizations should migrate their legacy FileNet content to the cloud.
Outdated & Unsupported Versions
Maintaining outdated software could be detrimental to your business. If your organization isn’t using the latest version of IBM FileNet (5.5), then your software will no longer be supported by IBM. This could result in disruption of your business if something were to break or go wrong, which is a far too common occurrence with highly-customized legacy software.
Highly-customized glitches demand highly-specialized IT repairs. In other words, even small system complications could have drastic financial implications in terms of time and resources.
High Total Cost of Ownership
Another significant factor and underlying driver for moving from FileNet on-premise to the cloud is cost-efficiency. FileNet has a reputation for expensive software solutions and professional services, with a focus on providing customized solutions for large enterprises that typically require customers to also purchase upgraded IBM hardware, software, and services.
Cloud infrastructures prevent organizations from spending massive sums on hardware and maintenance. With cloud-based ECM, organizations don’t have to spend massive amounts of money on purchasing and maintaining equipment. This significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO), removing additional investments like hardware, facilities, utilities, or potentially maintaining a large data center in order to effectively grow your business. Cloud infrastructure also reduces expenses relating to downtime. Since it is exceedingly rare in cloud systems, you won’t have to spend time and money fixing potential issues related to downtime.
Heightened Security Risks
Businesses maintaining on-premises data infrastructure inevitably have security concerns. Unless your company is already in the business of IT security, the time and effort spent on securing your on-premises data may distract your core functions. Most organizations likely don’t have a robust and experienced team of cybersecurity professionals at their disposal to protect their on-premises data adequately. With on-premise security levels only being as reliable as the security policies that have been put in place and implemented, many organizations are seeking alternatives to an on-premise legacy system.
Cloud service providers have embedded security features directly within the technology to ensure the protection of sensitive customer data. On top of that, cloud service providers are legally required to meet strict industry compliance standards set by highly-regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, and government institutions. By migrating to the cloud, organizations can modernize IT infrastructures in accordance with best practices and protect their applications from security breaches and human error.
Content Silos and Fragmentation
Over the years, many FileNet customers have accumulated multiple document repositories and often added them on top of other IBM content products such as Content Manager on Demand (CMOD). Massive amounts of structured data and unstructured content often reside within these multiple and disconnected information silos, creating compliance and security risks and preventing employees from accessing the information they need to perform their jobs.
Migrating from a legacy ECM system to a more modern repository can not only be a quick fix to accommodate the ever-increasing volumes of enterprise content and data, but it is also a solution to effectively centralize and streamline management of business processes and workflows.
Limited Scalability, Limited Growth
As the IT landscape becomes more complex and integrations and extensions into other business applications become a standard requirement, development needs to be agile and leverage low-code tools just to keep up. Unfortunately, this is where legacy systems like FileNet can fall behind, ultimately hindering the organization’s ability to scale and innovate.
Technology is more important than ever for organizational growth, and this stems from maintaining a flexible, integrated content management system that allows users to easily find, access, and collaborate on information, and centralize business workflows. Cloud-based content management platforms provide infinitely greater possibilities in terms of connectivity and integrations across business systems and departments, and allow for greater user mobility, with auto-scaling functionality.
Limiting Infrastructure
Maintaining legacy systems such as IBM FileNet can limit your organizations’ ability to take advantage of emerging technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced data analytics. If your competitors are already leveraging these emerging technologies while you cling to familiar legacy infrastructure and shadow IT, long-term costs could be huge.
Business agility is critical in the modern global economy. Embracing modern, cloud-based systems that can support emerging technologies and offer flexible, on-demand IT resources is essential for keeping pace with your competitors and rapidly changing industry dynamics.
Ready to Make the Move?
If your organization is still using a legacy ECM system, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with some of these pitfalls and barriers to growth. Migrating large volumes of content from IBM FileNet may seem like an arduous and time-consuming task, but it doesn’t have to be. Fast2 helps streamline the migration process and can help deliver both short-term ROI, and long-term gains both financially and in terms of business process efficiency.
Fast2 is designed to migrate and consolidate billions of documents to the cloud, with a user-friendly interface for fast adoption, and a seasoned tech team with over 10 years of expertise to tackle any potential edge cases. Like FileNet on-premises, aging legacy EMC systems lack the increasingly demanding cloud capabilities that modern enterprises require. So get your migration process started the right way; reach out toFast2 today!