Guest post by Tom Jenkins 

There's little doubt that content is being generated at lightning speed. Casual Internet surfing reveals the number and breadth of websites and blogs, on just about any topic, continues to grow. Newspapers alone produce in the neighborhood of 100 terabytes of content in just one year. But while it's apparent to all that content is exploding in the public arena, it's even more so in the private sector. 

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo's some 5 billion web pages each pale in comparison with my company that generates that amount of content each day through email and all other types of content. Every month content doubles within enterprises and will jump to daily before the decade is out. This is not just the output of desktop computers but smartphones, social media sites--such as Facebook, and Twitter--YouTube, iPads and even automatically from server to server. 

The role of the cloud in content management

It was this astronomical content growth, coupled with the wave of new delivery methods and tools in Web 2.0, that spurred me to write Managing Content in the Cloud. I wanted to help companies gain insight into the growth of the Internet--or the cloud--and how to manage the people, processes and content that make up the cloud. 

It is those companies that learn how to effectively manage and use the content that's out there and have systems in place for the continuing deluge that will maintain their competitive advantage. The advantages of the cloud are simply better methods of delivering content to more people; but for enterprises, the new ideas that grow from employees having greater access to information and better collaboration ultimately leads to innovation. 

What is so important about the cloud? 

At its most basic, the cloud is software or services that are resident, not on individual computers, but on servers. In computing's youth in the 1970s, large mainframes and then minicomputers safeguarded content that was accessed via dumb terminals. Then personal computers came along and programs shifted to individual computers in the 1980s and 90s. In the past few years, the ability to download large music and video files has led us back to servers that can easily handle enormous files. But this time servers number in the thousands or, as in the case of Google, about 1 million. 

Many of us already spend much of our time in the cloud, using web-based email, social networking sites, photo and video services and smartphones. In the near future, it is predicted that most computing will take place in the cloud, not through resident software on our PCs. This can be through either a cloud infrastructure (IaaS), in which storage and virtual servers are accessed for a fee that covers only as much space as needed; a cloud platform (PaaS), delivery of a computer platform or software stack as a service; or a cloud application, known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Clouds exist in three forms--marketplace, workplace and a combination of the two called a hybrid. A marketplace or public cloud delivers resources over the Internet, and a workplace or private cloud does the same thing through private networks. I recommend enterprises set up a hybrid cloud to have the security of a workplace cloud with the availability of offerings of a marketplace one. 

The social workplace

Web 2.0 technologies including wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and social networking tools, as well as the new Web 3.0, in which content is highly personalized, are the vehicles for cruising through the cloud. Fortunately, companies are increasingly viewing them as productivity tools. This is because they are creating flexible and exciting new ways for people to connect, interact and collaborate. Within the enterprise, collaboration forms the basis of a social workplace, which is arranged around areas of interest. The traditional worker/manager hierarchy is sidestepped when employees are encouraged to share ideas and knowledge within communities or forums on their companies' Intranets. And the sharing leads to more job satisfaction, which leads to more innovation-the key benefit for enterprises. 

The key of course is a "managed business environment." The nature of social media is openness, which is fine for the private user, but more than a bit risky for enterprises. When third party applications are used in the business environment, companies are open to malware that can sneak in undetected. Using tools available outside of the firewall puts corporate information at risk. However, effective enterprise content management practices can cut down on the security risks in Web 2.0 tools. To determine if content is at risk, an organization needs to determine how its Web 2.0 content is stored, how the content is managed and whether management and storage methods meet with compliance regulations and internal governance policies.

ECM in the cloud

The cloud presents opportunities for enterprises to save money by "renting" software, services and platforms rather than spending time and money building infrastructure from scratch. Assigning computing tasks such as document management, archiving and workflow to a remote location allows organizations to focus their time and resources on activities that drive significant business value. But the issues of data protection, operational integrity, business continuity and disaster recovery that are attendant in Web 2.0 tools are also a barrier to moving content into the cloud for many enterprises. Regardless of how alluring the cost-saving feature is, some organizations fear having sensitive data "out there in the cloud" and not snug and safe behind a firewall. 

But as content continues its inexorable growth, the cloud and its enormous information-sharing  potential have an ally in ECM, which is likewise expanding and adapting. Cloud platforms give IT departments the ability to remove hardware implementation from the overall ECM picture. As a result, organizations can deliver new applications without having to purchase the hardware, software and consultants required to set up and run corporate systems. 

What's left is enterprise content management that, operating through the cloud, greatly enhances computing power, akin to the tens of trillions of computations per second of a popular Internet search engine versus the average PC's 3 billion computations per second. As a cloud service, ECM offers enterprises tremendous capacity to collect, correlate and analyze data. And ECM isn't bound by language, a hindrance in traditional databases. ECM applications can be designed to store content that's translated into many different languages, even those with symbolic character sets such as Asian languages.  

With the advent of Unicode that supports all the world's written languages, social media tools continue to be more and more personalized. Users will be assisted in their online searches by an added intelligence that can understand meaning and context, such as filling in words as they're typed in search engines. This is the basis of Web 3.0, also called the Semantic Web for its ability to tease out meaning in searchers' intentions. ECM will follow the development of the Semantic Web--becoming more flexible, multi-platform and secure.

As enterprises gain an upper hand on the security and privacy issues that keep computing in the cloud from widespread adoption, its advantages will become apparent. Employees will have more and better access to one another through blogging, communities and other forums, breaking through the hierarchical barriers that can constrain organizations and bringing the fresh ideas that inevitably lead to innovation. In the past with new enterprise technologies, companies could sit on the sidelines for a while before adopting them. But with the pace of change continuing to accelerate, that luxury is gone. The time to get moving is now.

Thomas Jenkins is Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer for Open Text Corporation and author of the book Managing Content in the Cloud.