A recent set of experiences at work has led me to ponder the question: can you move your intranet to the cloud?
The answer it would appear is that often given by consultants: "yes, but it depends!"
So what does it depend on? Well, let's investigate some of the variables.
What and Why ?
The first thing to consider is what is your definition of "cloud"? I am not going to be purist about this. Whether it's a "true" multi-tenant public cloud, hosted managed services or even a corporate private cloud, what I am really looking for here is removing the technology stack from my data center / LAN and thus potentially supporting the stack, and even developing for it using staff who aren't on my organization's core payroll.
This diagram is courtesy of Sam Johnston via Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike V3.0)
I will be a little more proscriptive in defining the technology stack. In essence, what I am looking for is a Web CMS for the core information publishing function on an intranet. Whether you prefer the term Digital Workplace, Intranet Ecosystem or some other label, when it comes down to it there are many cloud based solutions for content centric collaboration or social collaboration.
However, apparently there are far fewer alternatives for that good old fashioned core intranet use case of content publishing, or portal development and not every organization is culturally mature enough yet to move to a social platform (e.g. Jive) as their intranet solution.
Organizational Size
Oh yes, size does indeed appear to count! There are some excellent cloud-based or hosted intranet solutions that unfortunately just do scale to 5,000 users. For example ThoughtFarmer is an excellent "social intranet" platform which can run on site or in the cloud, but either way, the ThoughtFarmer team doesn't recommend it for more than 5,000 users.
There are other alternatives, which may serve you in the Small to Medium Enterprise space, with many “intranet in a box” offerings moving to a cloud model, and even heavy duty intranet focused CMS platforms like Ektron are doing interesting things which can include hybrid models via their Cloud Manager product.
Organizational Readiness
So how mature is your organizational culture with respect to moving data into the cloud in general? Do you have standards in place? Or do your Info Sec and Enterprise Architecture colleagues have apoplexy when you mention moving content off your network and outside of your trusty firewall?
This is potentially where the variations of public versus private cloud, versus managed hosting services etc. come into play. Risk assessment is of course the broadly scoped answer to this conundrum, for which there are many corporate or public methodologies which are beyond the scope of this article.
Potential Paths to Investigate
If you're a SharePoint house for portal, WCM and other Intranet functionality, then you can investigate their cloud offering under the Office 365 brand. There will of course be plenty of potential partners to advise you on advantages and warn you of pitfalls, but I am no Office 365 expert, and I don't like SharePoint as a Web CMS !
Continue reading this article:
Source : cmswire[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment