Much has been made recently about the effect of cloud computing on the future of electronic document management and paper based business process automation. From my experiences working directly with IT managers and line of business owners, the debate is far from over, even though the ultimate outcome may be pre-ordained. Arguments against center around security and the uneasiness felt by having an organizations business critical information “floating” around seemingly less secure than if it were under the lock and key of the enterprises own servers and firewall. The arguments for are many, but primarily focus on significantly reduced costs and ease of use. In a world where sophisticated technology was the domain of large enterprise that could afford the upfront capital expenditures in both software/hardware and implementation pre and post support, the cloud is bring those technologies to small and midsized business at a price that they can afford. So while large enterprise may still opt for an in house solution requiring large resources, the long tail of American enterprise will continue to adopt “The Cloud” at an ever increasing rate.
