Cloud & On-Premises DAM Compared – Will History Repeat Itself?
David Diamond, marketing director of one of the DAM News featured vendors, Picturepark and author of the DAM Survival Guide has written an article for CMSWire comparing the relative merits of Cloud and On-Premises (installed) DAM: Cloud DAM vs On-site: There is No Real Contest.
The stand-out point for me was this one:
“But as speedy as LANs can be, you might find that as more applications move into the Cloud, the only aspect of your workflow that’s not Cloud-based is you. The Google Drive integration for Gmail offers a great example of how one can create and share “files” that are created in the Cloud and never leave it. We’ll see the Adobe Creative Suite and other production applications there soon enough — count on it.” [Read More]
This is a very good observation and it might be the killer blow that secures it for the Cloud in years to come. The capital cost needed for businesses to keep maintaining their own infrastructure is not going to be justifiable, so more apps are going to be held outside the corporate network and that will put further pressure on the others that remain to follow suit. However, I think there might be a twist in the tail as IT departments especially decide they quite like the Cloud’s scalability, but they’ll still be the ones deploying the apps to it, thank you. Nick Brookes and Naresh Sarwan discussed this issue on these pages here on DAM News when they covered this subject last week and reached the same conclusion that I have.
As most seasoned technology industry watchers know, IT is basically a fashion business and the nearer to the sharp-end you get, the more nervous the technical guys become that they are ‘behind the curve’ and not keeping up with the latest trends. At many of the clients I come into contact with, when the subject of Cloud hosting crops up, there is often no shortage of people from the IT department eager to get drafted in for Cloud projects. Moving up the food chain, many mid and senior level IT execs are equally conscious of the need to have something that says ‘Cloud’ on their CV (resumé) too. For the IT department, the Cloud has as many compelling benefits as they do for SaaS providers, so it’s no surprise they will want to copy the same approach but retain managerial control.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I suspect many of the battles between self-hosted vs hosted by the application provider won’t actually go away, they will just move to new data centres that are not owned by either party.
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