Rush to the Cloud
The past decade has been a wild ride when you look at the advances in cloud computing. Although adoption was slow during its formative years, a recent survey by RightScale showed that 96% of respondents are leveraging the cloud in some way, shape or form, and approximately 60% of enterprise workloads will be running on some form of hosted cloud service.
The core drivers for cloud adoption have been outlined extensively, but a key feature has been the ability to slowly and methodically migrate via a hybrid cloud strategy. Hybrid cloud means different things to different people, so here is a quick definition:
hybrid cloud
noun
- A computing environment that uses a mix of on-premise, private cloud and public cloud services with orchestration between environments.
“Orchestration” is the key word in this definition and will be a theme and focus for the rest of this post.
Why are some apps and services being left behind?
There some applications that just can’t go to the cloud. Many legacy software vendors have not invested in the “cloudification” of their applications, and these limitations have left many organizations with on-premise anchors that have become a persistent headache from a management perspective. Content capture is one of these areas of pain, with most vendors lacking cloud-ready feature sets, including web browser interfaces, comprehensive APIs and Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities.
In addition, many legacy capture vendors have taken an “all or nothing” approach to initial cloud offerings, with no way to leverage initial on-premise investments or ease into cloud capture with a hybrid scenario: you are either on-premise or in the cloud. They just don’t have the orchestration technology to coordinate a hybrid of on-premise and cloud infrastructures.
The Hybrid Challenge
What is necessary to enable the hybrid smart capture bridge, allowing organizations to leverage on-premise investments and the power of the cloud? Creating the software conduit between environments requires some key attributes:
Flexible Configuration – The application used for processing must allow the user to pick and choose what workloads to send to the cloud. This should be the minimum requirement along with being completely automated.
Transparency – It should be completely transparent to users whether the cloud or on-premise resources are being utilized. The application should control and orchestrate document workflows automatically.
Security – Creating a secure conduit and ensuring cloud data is protected is paramount. At a minimum, there should be secure API keys, and HTTPS endpoint, encrypted data at rest and a timed purge of documents and data.
Native Cloud – To harness the true power of the cloud, especially in CPU intensive document capture processes, native cloud applications are key. Serverless architectures can provide scaling beyond any on-premise system capability to deliver “horsepower on demand.”
The Ephesoft Solution
Ephesoft recently launched its new groundbreaking hybrid cloud offering as an add-on with the release of Ephesoft Transact 2019.1, called the Cloud HyperExtender. This hybrid cloud solution allows existing high and variable volume customers the opportunity for “pay as you go” cloud access to speed and scalability that cannot be achieved with on-premise or single instance solutions.
In addition, it provides legacy capture customers the opportunity to bridge their move to the cloud and take the next steps necessary towards offloading all capture workloads to a more affordable and scalable solution.
