According to Gartner, half of all enterprise content will be machine authored as well as managed on hybrid cloud systems by 2018.
File synchronisation and sharing are expected be a standard embedded Enterprise Content Management business function, while over 20% of all businesses will be managing content from multiple organisations.
These realities emphasise the urgent need for businesses to update and future-proof processes by investing in systems that allow content to be smoothly integrated and easily accessed online, says Gartner.
Across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, legal and retail industries, the demand for ECM and Business Process Management systems to be personalised and hyper-connected is rapidly increasing - magnified by the continuous rise in e-commerce and an increasingly agile workplace and consumer.
Legacy ECM systems, on which many businesses still operate, are unable to integrate structured content and unstructured data, creating significant issues for companies across sectors, including loss of data and inefficient processes. In addition, businesses are facing the pressing challenges of rising data centre costs and increased security demand, as regulated companies want to maintain steadfast control of critical files while also avoiding the stress of massive data centres.
The cloud's ability to bring external stakeholders into internal business processes much more easily tackles a major pain-point for businesses today. Despite popular belief, sharing data and content with business partners is both secure and compliant, which is imperative for heavily regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare.