Solving the Cloud’s Hidden Problem: Access to Knowledge in a Fragmented Environment

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

In the past several years, as cloud computing has become one of the top IT priorities, we can agree that, for the most part, we’ve overcome the primary concerns associated with the technology – security, reliability and performance. With these concerns at least partly alleviated, it’s important to now look at how to quickly locate your data in the cloud. While the cloud is a revolutionary delivery platform for its scalability, flexibility and freedom to place a company’s most powerful IT assets in the hands of any user, there’s one capability that your cloud may complicated: access to relevant knowledge.

The move to the cloud, plus the continuity of enterprise systems, plus social media, plus growth in unstructured content, equals fragmentation and an inability to find relevant knowledge. Beyond the challenge of a highly heterogeneous environment, the reality is that cloud environments, combined with an increased number of data channels, pose one of the biggest knowledge gaps facing companies today. Cloud-based systems house critical information, and with the amount of data doubling every 12 months, it’s another place where knowledge may be lost. Cloud-based systems contribute to an already crowded chaos of applications, databases and online resources…

IT has traditionally handled this problem through integration – that has been a very complicated, time-consuming and expensive task. In a fragmented and heterogeneous environment, enterprises should resist the temptation to migrate data to a central system. The more data moves around, the more complicated it becomes to find again. And we’ve all learned from experience that systems of record never really contain the “only” record. Fragments of data simply proliferate outside the system of record. Different processes, point solutions, employee-activated cloud solutions, the list grows. Unfortunately, employees end up using incomplete or wrong information, or simply re-inventing the wheel…

Read more from the source @ http://cloudtimes.org/2013/05/13/solving-the-clouds-hidden-problem-access-to-knowledge-in-a-fragmented-environment/