Enable AI & automation for your enterprise content with IBM Content Cortex

Organizations managing growing volumes of content need effective document access and sharing systems to maintain operational efficiency. IBM Content Cortex on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) helps teams improve information access, support decision-making processes, and enhance business operations. This solution enables organizations to maintain security standards and compliance requirements while freeing IT teams to focus on innovation rather than system management. In this blog, you’ll learn how IBM Content Cortex works on ROSA and how integrations with AWS services can create a comprehensive solution for your intelligent content needs.

IBM cortex value

What is IBM Content Cortex on ROSA

IBM Content Cortex is an agentic content services platform that centralizes, governs, and activates enterprise content with the power of AI — at the scale and security your business requires. It is the natural evolution of FileNet Content Manager, Content Manager OnDemand, and Content Manager Enterprise Edition, unifying IBM’s content services portfolio into a single, AI-ready platform.

When deployed on ROSA, you gain simplified configuration, management, and ongoing operational support. Enterprise content is the biggest untapped AI asset — IBM Content Cortex puts it to work by turning passive storage into an intelligent system that works on behalf of your teams.

IBM Content Cortex is organized around three core pillars:

IBM content Cortex 3 pillars

IBM Content Cortex includes several key platform capabilities:

• Remote MCP Server – Connect AI models directly to your content with Model Context Protocol, with no waiting or complex setup.
• Intelligent Archiving – Up to 30:1 compression for long-term content delivers significant storage savings with instant retrieval, one platform for both active and archival content.
• Navigator Core Agent – Give your teams natural language access to the content they need without switching tools. Ask questions, retrieve documents, and execute tasks directly in Content Navigator.
• Enterprise Security and Governance – Fine-grained access controls enforced natively across all documents and their semantic representations, with protection against data leakage by architecture.
• Business Automation Insights – Operational dashboards surface content performance, lifecycle status, and governance compliance, giving leaders the visibility to act on content AI readiness.
• Retention and Disposition – Apply legally defensible retention schedules and disposition policies across billions of documents automatically. Every action is auditable.

Advantages of IBM Content Cortex

• Agents built into the content lifecycle, not bolted on — Classification, legal hold application, redaction, and search execute within the content lifecycle through native embedding.
• MCP-native for any agent runtime — Built with production-ready MCP servers from the ground up. watsonx Orchestrate, Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT — any AI runtime can execute content operations with full security enforcement.
• Governance at enterprise scale — Manages 16 billion documents, 33 PB in a single repository, and 600M API calls per month with full audit trails throughout.
• Protection against data leakage by architecture — Security enforced at every layer. When a document is deleted, all derived embeddings are deleted too.
• 30 years of regulated enterprise trust — IBM content services solutions have managed the world’s most sensitive content for over three decades.

Advantages of Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

• Undifferentiated heavy lifting: A fully managed OpenShift platform offloads cluster management, patching, and logging from content and line-of-business teams.
• Enterprise-Grade Reliability: Backed by a joint Red Hat and AWS 95% uptime SLA capable of sustaining heavy, multi-million daily API call volumes.
• Financial Synergy: Consumption counts 100% toward the enterprise’s AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) commitments with fully consolidated billing.
• Co-Engineered Peace of Mind: Built on a strict IBM + Red Hat + AWS joint reference architecture for rapid, validated deployment.

Content Cortex on ROSA arch

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) & AWS Integration

When you deploy IBM Content Cortex on ROSA, you work with a fully managed Red Hat OpenShift environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). ROSA serves as a comprehensive application platform that simplifies scaling, maintains cross-environment consistency, and improves deployment timelines—allowing your team to focus on intelligent content capabilities while Red Hat handle cluster operations. Features like ROSA with Hosted Control Planes deliver additional cost advantages and simplified deployment. By leveraging ROSA’s native ability to interface with the broader AWS service ecosystem, organizations can easily extend their architecture, enhance performance, and maximize security without the complexity of managing integrations within their hybrid estate.

To deliver enterprise scale and support AI agent capabilities, IBM Content Cortex is commonly paired with native AWS managed services for its underlying storage, metadata, and retrieval layers:

Storage Options

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): Functions as the primary, cost-effective object storage tier for vast document repositories via native Content Platform Engine S3 device drivers, the Infrequent Access tier saves up to 40% on storage costs.
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS): Delivers scalable, shared file storage for active Content Cortex application workloads across ROSA worker nodes using the standard efs-sc storage class.
• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP : Offers high-performance, multi-protocol file storage with enterprise deduplication and snapshotting for transactional content stores.

AWS Database and Data Management

• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) / Aurora for PostgreSQL: Serves as the fully managed relational database backbone to store, secure, and manage Content Cortex system metadata with multi-AZ high availability.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service: Acts as the dedicated vector and text retrieval engine, indexing document content to power Content Cortex’s semantic search, full-text queries, and natural language AI agents.

Running IBM Content Cortex on ROSA

Deploying IBM Content Cortex on ROSA establishes an operational model that redefines how teams manage cloud-native software. ROSA operates as a fully managed application platform, Red Hat SREs take on the heavy lifting of cluster management, node provisioning, security patching, and platform upgrades. This shift frees your IT personnel from low-level infrastructure upkeep, allowing them to focus entirely on higher-value business capabilities—like building document classification workflows, automating legal hold and retention policies, and tuning MCP-native AI agents.

Scalability, Reliability, and Cost Efficiency

As a managed application platform, ROSA provides built-in elasticity to handle fluctuating enterprise workloads seamlessly. Native horizontal pod autoscaling allows Content Cortex to dynamically absorb massive document ingestion bursts, such as quarter-end financial processing or large-scale legal discovery. Architecturally, running on ROSA delivers multi-Availability Zone reliability backed by a 99.95% SLA. Economically, pairing IBM Content Cortex’s 30:1 compression with AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) consumption significantly lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to legacy on-premises setups.

Simplified Update Management

ROSA’s managed lifecycle framework provides a decoupled update model that keeps system operations smooth and predictable. IBM manages Content Cortex application updates independently, enabling fast feature delivery without cluster-level disruption. Meanwhile, Red Hat SREs handle routine OpenShift platform maintenance and security upgrades in the background, which can be easily scheduled through flexible maintenance windows

Natural Language Access to Enterprise Content

• Unified Interface Access: Employees interact directly with complex corporate records via IBM Content Navigator using plain natural language—completely eliminating application switching.
• AI Agent Execution: Business users can ask complex questions, synthesize multiple files, or trigger automation tasks safely, knowing the underlying AI agents are rigidly bound by existing enterprise security and governance protocols.

Conclusion:

Choosing IBM Content Cortex on ROSA isn’t just about deploying an application—it’s about making a strategic decision to transform how your organization manages and activates its most valuable asset: enterprise content. By leveraging ROSA as a fully managed application platform alongside IBM Content Cortex’s AI-driven content capabilities, businesses can balance operational efficiency with cost savings while maintaining the agility, governance, and security needed for today’s competitive environment.

With proven results — information requests reduced from 3 months to under 1 hour, 90% lower administrative costs, and 250% lending volume growth without additional hires — IBM Content Cortex on ROSA delivers measurable business outcomes at enterprise scale.