This year’s AWS Summit featured much buzz around cloud services and products, and one of the recurring stories was how partner services have been able to utilize AWS to provide definitive value to their clients.  Alfresco is one of those companies and in a sit down interview on theCUBE, Luis Sala, Alfresco Director of Technology Alliances, shared his story on the tremendous growth and evolution of their services that has been made possible by their relationship with AWS.  Once free from classic architectures and with the flexibility to expand and innovate, the company has basically rolled into a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that is able to transverse different architectures.  On-prem, pure cloud and hybrid scenarios are all part of Alfresco’s DNA and with it they are afforded tremendous flexibility.

He went on in detail: “Over time we’ve discovered that 1) our technology lent itself very nicely to being deployed to AWS and 2), people are catching on to the idea of deploying our product to AWS.”

Here is where Sala sees the beauty of AWS:

• compute
• servers
• storage
• database

“Our product works really well there; we realized we could easily integrate S3 – which has its own proprietary interface; we started demonstrating this to customers, people started deploying this and it took off like wildfire,” boasted Sala.

Alfresco is rooted historically as an open source technology that has since evolved into the service it is today.  It offers document management for enterprises that require tight security and control of their documents within their environments.  Document management comes in all kinds of forms, but what makes Alfresco unique is how they have extended their product onto the AWS infrastructure, adding hybrid and pure cloud functionality that would work well with existing customers and new customers alike.  Also, if a pure AWS customer wanted to integrate this, it is a ready-built option.  That’s the great success story for Alfresco — they’ve managed to utilize the AWS cloud proposition in textbook fashion, bridging classic architecture and classic product with cutting edge cloud advantages.

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Security-minded customers

“The customers who tend to use our products are the ones who care about the security and privacy of the data – they want to be very selective about how this data gets exposed outside of their environment,” detailed Sala. “We need to build a lot of credibility and best practices in order to demonstrate that customers can get to the cloud while still respecting those policies. Our business has grown. Our SaaS customers tend to use us primarily for more lightweight collaboration nowadays, but we are building a whole new Suite of SaaS products that deliver specific business functionality – I’m going to use contracts management as an example here: we are delivering exclusively to the cloud, but it’s going to work on-prem and behind a firewall.”

Document management, collaboration and file services have evolved in many, many ways.  Security is a big part of this evolutions because the paradigm has shifted so dramatically.  It used to be that you had to control documents within the parameters of your four-wall environment.  That playing field has changed with the advent of mobility, documents in the cloud, federations with partners and clients, and more.

Sometimes there is a need to have a select number of documents onsite as a matter of policy and/or compliance, which opens the door to the need for hybrid solutions.  There are many more types of devices accessing this data than ever before, and there is also a need in many environments to audit who accesses what, from where and when.  That’s what makes Alfresco such an interesting story, in that they have been able to capitalize on the ready-made cloud infrastructure to provide their service to clients in need of such solutions.  As Sala alludes, it is a service that is growing, but it also requires a lot of credibility to be built in, with a lot of best practices, creation of policies and enforcement to be successful.  Great infrastructure is a part of that.

photo: ralphbijker via photopin cc