By now, you may be sick of hearing about the cloud. After all, the hype has been inescapable over the last few years. Microsoft has reduced it to a silly slogan, "To the cloud!" But the cloud is much more than a marketing term. It's a set of technologies that introduce a new strategy for your company to handle computing. The term itself stems from network diagrams that portray a set of services running in a cloud, as the graphic below clearly illustrates.

But that's the technical view of it. At its simplest level, the cloud creates a series of services running on someone else's servers. It could be storage space on Amazon Web Services or a computing platform on top of Salesforce.com or it could be an application as a service like Google's Gmail.

The cloud removes some complexity from the installation, configuration and overall management of an application. Since it's not stored on-premise, you don't have to worry about installing it or updating it. Once you sign up, it's good to go and whenever there is an update it happens automatically on the vendor's side.

Of course, for all of this convenience, there is a price. The cost in this case is less control over your content. When it sits on servers that are not owned by your company, you lose some control over it. You have to trust the vendor to secure your company's data, and you have to build an understanding up front for addressing governance issues, such as how quickly it will respond to an eDiscovery order.

You can always use the service level agreement (SLA) to define the terms of your relationship with the vendor, but as you'll see, it's not always a simple matter to get a vendor to make changes to the basic agreement. You have to decide as an organization just how much you are willing to give up to go the cloud.

From a pure content management perspective, the cloud provides some real advantages. The installation and configuration of on-premise content management systems is not a trivial matter. It takes a lot of work and you can remove that pain by choosing a cloud solution. The cloud also greatly simplifies content access, allowing enterprises the ability to let employees create, edit and access content wherever they are, regardless of the device (assuming you or your vendor have created apps or have browser access for a given platform).

But ultimately it comes down to your own comfort level. This eBook explores some of the issues you'll encounter as you consider cloud content management solutions--regardless of the type of cloud service you are considering.

The cloud offers many advantages, but it's important to consider where cloud solutions excel and where they come up short before you go with a cloud vendor.

This commentary is excerpted from the latest FierceContentManagement eBook, "Don't Fear the Cloud". For more information, download the eBook here. - Ron