Alfresco Announces Managed Solution and Simplified Deployment Options for Amazon Web Services

The Alfresco managed offering advances the flow of digital business by providing a robust content-centric platform allowing users to collaborate on business-critical content, all with the network isolation and security of a dedicated AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and without the dedicated internal resources for ongoing Alfresco and AWS management. The Alfresco platform on AWS makes high-throughput processes such as processing millions of invoices and managing highly confidential contracts more efficient in the cloud.

For example, the United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) of Greater Chicago leverages Alfresco on AWS for a more dynamic, scalable and cost-effective platform to provide service to 176,000 people in Chicago. With Alfresco’s platform, the UCP and hundreds of other affiliates can seamlessly deliver digital books to children, and manage more than 11,000 files including K-12 textbooks, interactive online exams, medical resources, videos, and counseling information.

“The Alfresco platform has the horsepower to help us manage a wide variety of digital content that we couldn’t anticipate otherwise in today’s rapidly changing technology environment,” said Steve Clements, director of program technologies for the United Cerebral Palsy Seguin of Greater Chicago. “Alfresco on Amazon has transformed the act of content management to a scalable business function, and helps us achieve true document management in the cloud.”

Key benefits of Alfresco’s managed service include:

• Smart Content Management: Alfresco on AWS makes it easy and intuitive for people to collaborate on content, track changes, review and approve content, and to include external partners.
• Easy to Configure and Extend: Tailor Alfresco to meet your specific business data model, rules, workflows and interfaces. Extend Alfresco into other systems with its modern REST APIs.
• Hands Free Management and Maintenance: Focus on your business and let Alfresco focus on delivering the right Alfresco experience that is always up to date, secure and leverages native AWS services.

For those that prefer to design, deploy and maintain their own systems, Alfresco and AWS have collaborated to publish the Alfresco QuickStart, a collection of Reference Architectures, CloudFormation templates, documentation and tools drawing on years of Alfresco expertise, tuning and best practices of running Alfresco on AWS. IT and DevOps staff will benefit from these tools, benchmarks and automated deployment references to set up high availability deployments of Alfresco One on Amazon Web Services using a variety of AWS resources across availability zones.

Whether managed by Alfresco or directly deployed by the customer, Alfresco’s advanced open source core platform offers open APIs and support for open standards making it easy to extend, customize and integrate existing applications and processes in AWS.

The announcement builds on Alfresco’s existing support of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an increasing number of Alfresco’s enterprise customers entrust AWS with their workloads. Alfresco’s ECM platform, Alfresco One, can easily handle over 1.2 billion documents on a full cloud-centric technology stack based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Amazon Aurora relational database engine. Together, the companies are providing a complete cloud services and cloud management portfolio that will give enterprise customers fast, flexible access to the cloud.

“As security demands increase at the same time that data center costs rise, customers are looking for virtual private clouds to reduce costs and better secure critical business information. Large and regulated companies want airtight control of their mission critical files, which can be over half the files in an organization, but without the hassle of huge data centers,” said John Newton, CTO and Founder of Alfresco. “We are excited to take our partnership with AWS to deliver the level of security that our customers expect with the ease of delivery of dedicated, managed services specifically designed to support cloud-based deployments of large business-critical information stores.”