The iManage Cloud: delivering consistent productivity everywhere

“Two years ago, we reported that the number of documents in the iManage Cloud was about a billion. Last year, we reported the number to be three and a half billion. Today, we're at north of 10 billion.” – Zia Bhatti, Chief Architect, iManage

The iManage Cloud has grown rapidly in the last three years, and it’s easy to understand why. Our unique cloud-native platform is secure, reliable, and performant—making it the preferred platform for knowledge professionals. At our recent ConnectLive user conference, Zia Bhatti, iManage Chief Architect, and Stew Beck, iManage Director of Engineering, presented some “under the hood” insights into why the iManage Cloud offers such a positive experience for users. These include:

• Consistent performance across the globe
• Incredible uptime with seamless updates
• Simplified data access through APIs

Great performance, everywhere

“To ensure great collaboration around the world, the iManage Cloud does a remarkable amount of routing work.” – Zia Bhatti, Chief Architect, iManage

iManage users need to work from anywhere. With the iManage Cloud, it’s possible.

Our usage data shows that knowledge workers are accessing documents in the iManage Cloud not only in major cities like New York, London, and Tokyo, but also in places as far-flung as the Maldives and Greenland. Serving these customers worldwide, wherever they are working, requires an impressive amount of routing.

The iManage Cloud has 10 data regions across the globe, and our customers choose the jurisdiction where they want their libraries to be based. This contrasts with a company like Google or Netflix, who  copy their data so it can be served from whatever location is closest.

Routing the jurisdictionally-located data in the iManage Cloud is a logistical challenge. For example, a user located in the Maldives could be working with files in the Singapore data region while collaborating with colleagues in the UK.

How do we ensure knowledge workers in all our locations are having a good experience?

We measure the end point performance at all our jurisdictions, including API performance, uploads, and downloads. We also have simulated remote devices around the globe that allow us to check that things are working appropriately for users worldwide.

Our users work everywhere, and so does the iManage Cloud.

Uptime and updates  

“We have been investing in and substantially improving our observability and responsiveness in order to maintain our uptime goals.” – Stew Beck, Director of Engineering, iManage

As our cloud grows, so too have our quality of service standards. Beyond our 99.95% uptime, we have an aggressive API error rate target of less than one error for every million requests. Those few errors that do occur, we aim to resolve quickly. We keep a very close eye on all our metrics to ensure that if there is an issue, we're aware of it, and we're working on a solution even before users have a chance to bring it to our attention. Our API response time is excellent, with 95% of all requests completed in less than a second. To ensure that end users have a great experience, user traffic is given higher priority, while other traffic from things like bulk operations or migrations is deprioritized and made to fit in the remaining available capacity.

Part of delivering a great user experience in our cloud is making updates as seamless as possible. With our global reach, there are no off-hours, which means it’s essential to minimize user interruptions. In 2024 alone, we have done more than 400 updates to our services—about five updates per business day—with zero downtime. This demonstrates the maturity of our change process, as well as the investments that we have made in automated testing and deployment automation.

To make it even easier for users to keep their iManage app up to date, we have introduced silent auto updates that operate in the background. This approach is the most effective and least disruptive way to deliver updates. Data bears this out—over 50% of users have automatic updates enabled, and feedback shows that they are 25% more satisfied with their experience than those who do not.

With the iManage Cloud, users can rely on industry-leading uptime and seamless updates.

Simplified access to data

“The data in the cloud is yours. We're just the custodians. Our job is to make sure that access to that data is simpler and faster.” – Zia Bhatti, Chief Architect, iManage

With billions of documents now stored in the iManage Cloud, it’s crucial that users can access their data with ease. APIs make that possible securely and reliably. iManage customers and partners are always coming up with new ways that they want their data integrated, including custom reports, import-exports for lateral transfers, data for analytics, eDiscovery, and, of course, AI. To address these needs, over 50 APIs were added just in the last 12 months. Some were added to support new features developed by our engineering team, and others were added based on specific requests from customers and partners.

One specific example of how we’ve made it easier for users to handle their data is Bulk Operations. With this feature, long-running processes are pushed to the cloud to run in the background so neither the app nor the user are impacted during operation. Importantly, the tasks are not impacted by the user closing their laptop to go to lunch or hopping on the train to go home. The job will be completed and a report detailing the outcome will be available for the user when they return.

You own the data you store in the iManage Cloud, and we are dedicated to ensuring it works for you.

Reliable. Up-to-date. Simple.

The iManage Cloud provides a reliable and performant platform for knowledge workers around the world. Discover more about the iManage Cloud on our website and if a cloud migration is in your future, start your journey with iManage now.