M+E Daily

Content is important to the success of everybody in the media and entertainment industry, and there are several benefits to managing one’s content in the cloud, according to Beth Vogel, Box group product marketing manager.

Managing your content in the cloud fosters collaboration, improves security and lowers costs, so an entire organization can work as one, she said Aug. 29, during the webinar “Introduction to Box as Cloud Content Management.”

All Box customers are facing challenges today and the “common theme” across all of them is that the “digital transformation really has been affecting them,” she said. Although the term “digital transformation” often serves as “overused business jargon,” she said there’s no denying that the digital trends we’re seeing are placing pressure on every organization today.

On the user front, there’s been increased end user expectations and there is now a need to collaborate across every team within an organization, according to Box. Meanwhile, IT people have become mired in support for multiple legacy systems and new security threats have emerged as a result of the digital transformation we’re seeing, according to Box.

IT people want to “empower” businesses to change and “most of the IT people we speak to are not interested in maintaining” the legacy systems of their organizations, Vogel said.
On the business level, customers now expect modern services and there’s an increased need to innovate and speed up processes, according to Box.

Companies are “trying to figure out how they can best harness the technological benefits” of the cloud to change their business models or “drive efficiency gains or take cost out” of their businesses, Vogel said.

Content has evolved in a “fragmented” manner, and that way of working “typically is insecure and costly” for companies, resulting in organizations “not working in the most efficient way,” she said, adding: “Employees were not being served relevant content at the right time, making it incredibly difficult for IT administrators to secure and govern,” and that has been “causing organizations to struggle.”

Underscoring just how much organizations have been struggling to work effectively, she cited data from an unspecified source that said 60% of workers think collaboration tools from their IT departments aren’t useful, while a whopping 93% of workers don’t have support for mobile workflows despite 76% of them saying it was essential, she said. In addition, 50% of enterprise content management projects have weaker than expected adoption rates and 76% of employees think it’s acceptable to move confidential documents to personal devices, she said.

If organizations used one platform – like Box — that worked for all their content, it would better enable collaboration and processes across the extended enterprise, she went on to say. Such a platform would have to be secure and compliant for every industry and geography, she said. Also, “integration is key,” she said, stressing the importance of integrating apps that people already work in.

Box currently has 74,000 customers, including some of the largest companies in the world, such as Cisco, eBay, General Electric, IBM and Western Digital, she added.