Realizing the Benefits of Enterprise Cloud

Cloud computing is one of the most significant innovations of the past decade. Enterprises worldwide continue to see a multitude of benefits by moving key business software and systems into the cloud—including improved accessibility, availability and uptimes; faster rollout of innovative functionality; more mobile, collaborative and engaged employees; leaner and more productive IT staffs; and better cost efficiencies. The growth in popularity of Box, Dropbox, Google G Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, and other enterprise applications, packages and services, amply demonstrate the benefits of cloud computing.

Microsoft Office 365, as an example, represents a major shift in how key business software is utilized. Rolled out to be an always-up-to-date cloud service for businesses, it demonstrates how cloud-based new technologies help leaders create more efficient and collaborative organizations.

Yet by and large, while enterprises are making great strides into cloud computing, document management remains largely stuck in the old client-server way of doing things. Some companies have integrated software that is hosted in the cloud, but those solutions typically require users to download the software to a device to use it.

While CIOs and IT departments have been under pressure at high costs to institute cloud-based software throughout the enterprise, one of the obstacles for document management has been PDF’s lateness in embracing the cloud. That’s meant that handling documents in the prevalent PDF format largely remains in the realm of computer applications, not cloud services.

But new technologies, like solutions offered by Foxit that enable PDF to be brought into today’s cloud-based environments, promise to make a big impact on enterprise costs and productivity by facilitating document management in the cloud. These solutions allow documents and all their associated business processes—not just storage—to be cloud-based. Foxit’s new PDF solutions, for example, can create customized PDF-based applications that can be utilized via the cloud, enabling enterprises to streamline processes and more easily collaborate.

Incorporating PDF in the cloud also enables organizations to access a rich and evolving set of metadata about their documents. Collaboration, sharing, version control, security access grants and revocations, and document usage tracking can take place anywhere, at any time, enabling deeper and richer knowledge about when and how recipients of documents utilize them. And surprisingly, new PDF technology will act as the “glue” that enables document tools, applications and content to be seamlessly integrated within cloud environments.

As the goal of organizational wide cloud migration looms, it’s time to take a hard look the way your organization approaches documents throughout their entire lifecycle—from creation to collaboration, publication to archiving. If your team hasn’t turned its attention to moving document management to the cloud, 2018 should be the transformative year when your enterprise finally takes advantage of the rich benefits that the cloud can bring to documents. By embracing this change, you can expect seamless document management experiences, resulting in better collaboration, efficiency and mobility.