The cloud content management world is fairly divided between those who believe a public cloud delivery model is the best option for customers (example, Box.com) and those who believe enterprises will only adopt a cloud approach when it is firmly protected within the confines of an enterprise’s own private cloud. The reality is, of course, far more nuanced than that and a much deeper acceptance of a hybrid future, at least in the medium term, is best. This is the approach that companies like Egnyte and OxygenCloud are taking and, to this group comes Alfresco who is today announcing the availability of hybrid cloud content for AWS.
So, what does that mean? Alfresco brings a shared drive and mobile access, alongside enterprise requirements such as version control and security. For AWS Alfresco is offering:
- A unified way to control, manage and continuously monitor all privileged access to the AWS Management Console and critical infrastructure
- Optimization for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), (RDS) and S3)
- Deployment across the EC2 and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as well as other private clouds, on-premise systems or any combination thereof.
- Support for MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server as the database for metadata and other system state while S3 is used to persist the actual documents and other files uploaded by users.
As an incentive to get customers trying the product the company is offering users who sign-up 10GB for free on a Private instance of Alfresco on AWS
MyPOV
So many content storage and management solutions – where to start? The bottom line is that, I believe, a hybrid solutions is the best way for enterprises to both leverage cloud benefits, but also gain maximum value from their existing assets. I believe that in the mid term most vendors will come to this realization and even such public cloud stalwarts as Box.com will start to offer a hybrid solution to enterprise customers.
Which leaves organizations with a quandary as to which solution to use – as is often the case with enterprise products, the due diligence needs to be done both on a technical basis, and a business one. Cloud greatly reduces the barriers to entry for vendors and hence the likely determining factor in a busy marketplace of alike products is which vendor has the highest level of business stability to ensure ongoing existence.
Alfresco is a great company and a good product, but they’re one of very, very many in this space.
