Using a standardized repository for content management reduces the risk of dependence on a particular software vendor and proprietary API.
Costs for maintaining and developing a content repository based custom application is significantly lower than developing and supporting your own interfaces and maintaining your own data repository applications (staff can be trained once, it is possible to take help from the community and the third party consulters).
Thanks to flexible layered JCR API (see below), it is possible to fit the legacy storage subsystem into new interfaces and decrease the costs and the risk of losing data.
An extension to the API exists as we can see in the following layer schema.
