Last Updated on February 28, 2025 Sarah Gayda
Monthly Industry Trends & Insights From Colligo CEO Tim Brady
At this point, many would say that “the cloud” and “adoption of cloud software” are ubiquitous.
In general, I agree with this. However, the records management and content management worlds have their own adoption curve.
Records management and content management lagged behind other core business areas in their migration to the cloud. This was largely due to the mission critical nature of the workflows and workloads, and the privacy and security concerns surrounding organizations’ most critical data and information.
Further, unlike other areas of the business (CRM, ERP, Supply Chain), records and content management, by nature, have many years of history of documents and very large troves of data. Generally, all of these records and data needed (and continue to need) to be migrated to the new systems of record and electronic document record management systems (EDRMS) in the cloud. This entails massive and carefully planned projects. Many of these projects are still taking place or haven’t begun yet.
In addition, much of the content is unstructured, exacerbating the complexity of these migrations. Contrarily, other areas of the business work with more structured sources of data. Unstructured data is very important to address when considering the implications for any future AI application rollouts.
We see a similar pattern across our customer base. Approximately 85% of our customers are currently running SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 compared with about 15% in 2020.
The sharp increase in cloud adoption is likely owing to our early bet to go all in on Microsoft 365 and the cloud with the launch of our Email Manager for Microsoft 365 in 2019-2020. However, this also serves as a good proxy for those organizations out there utilizing SharePoint Online vs. SharePoint Server/On-Premise.
The implication here is that the adoption of Cloud and Microsoft 365 (and SharePoint Online as the repository of record) has been very strong. Many of the fears of the past around security, privacy, access and permissions, and uptime in the cloud have largely been quelled and disbanded as most of the world’s largest organizations across highly regulated industries are now trusting Microsoft 365 – and Colligo.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Colligo. Think of them as ‘strong opinions, loosely held.’ Proceed with curiosity and a sense of humor!
