In an interesting development since we last spoke about records management and a hybrid cloud solution, the US Department of Energy has teamed up with that wacky bunch of engineers at the National Nuclear Security Administration to develop a secure, hybrid cloud solution that they plan to make available to other departments, as well as potentially other federal agencies. You can read more about it here.
So why does this development matter to SharePoint records managers? Admittedly, adoption of cloud-based solutions hasn’t exploded in the manner that so many experts had been predicting. The same publication that reported the story above also reports that when they asked organizations, ‘What are your company’s plans for cloud computing?’, only 33% of the companies said they were receiving services today from a cloud provider. This figure is up from 31% last year, but not a particularly high number given that the survey asks only if the company is using cloud computing somewhere within the organization.
However, the US Federal government – which, for better or worse, tends to be in front of these types of technology trends – is committed to cloud computing and actively promoting it through its ‘Cloud First’ strategy. And Fortune 500 companies seem to be falling right behind them given my own personal observations. Add to that the cloud focus that Microsoft is pushing for…well… everything and you have a very compelling argument for developing your own SharePoint cloud-based records management strategy.
