Traditionally, enterprise search engines have been firmly planted on the ground.  Now, along with almost everything else in enterprise IT, search engines are quickly moving into the sky.  But why?  What factors are prompting the growth of cloud-based search engines?  Given the immense IT security (and mindset) challenges associated with indexing sensitive content in the cloud, why are vendors continuing to march full-speed in this direction?

1. Follow the Content

Almost all of my enterprise search clients are indexing at least one cloud-based content repository, such as Box, Salesforce, Google Drive, Office 365, etc.  This historically involved writing connectors that download all of the information back to an on-premise search engine.  As more content sources move to the cloud, it is becoming increasingly inefficient (and absurd?) to download all of the content back to the ground so it can be indexed.