maart 07, 2016
Marketers today must continue to find innovative ways of delivering value to the business, while juggling priorities and increasingly tighter budgets. You've made a decision to use a best-of-breed content management solution by going with the Sitecore CMS, but what you may not have considered, is moving your Sitecore infrastructure to the cloud.
The advantages of doing this are many, but here's why it makes sense for marketers:
1. Your website, 24 x7
Our clients consistently tell us that their web site forms an important element of their overall marketing and sales strategy and the notion of it being unavailable is just not possible. In the past, building out a solution with high availability was both costly and complicated. Today, moving Sitecore to the cloud will provide you with almost guaranteed uptime - no more calls in the middle of the night informing you that your site is down.
2. It's faster to set up than you might think
The ease of setting up an environment is as simple as calling up your favourite cloud provider and handing them your credit card information. With predefined deployment packages, the effort in setting up a Sitecore environment can be done in a matter of minutes. Once set up, scaling an environment up or down based on your needs is easily taken care of through adjustment via configuration modules.
3. Storage is unlimited
For many marketers, seasonality, campaigns or other factors can impact the overall performance of your web properties. With the cloud, unlimited capacity is available at your fingertips allowing automatic scaling of the environment based on the current needs and demands. Since most cloud services are charged on a consumption based model, you only pay for what you use.
4. You can free up your IT department for more important things
These days, IT is stretched to the limit. Asking your IT group to stand-up and maintain your Sitecore CMS will often be received with gritted teeth rather than open arms. A Sitecore cloud solution gives you, the marketer, the added benefit of extending your internal IT by letting the pros who manage and optimize Sitecore in the cloud do what they do best. Giving your IT group more time to work on, that other project you’ve been bugging them about
5. Keeping a handle on costs
The low cost subscription model of cloud services not only makes it easy and quick to get up and running but also allows you to more effectively budget for initiatives throughout the year. However, many are finding out the hard way that the cost savings they thought they would experience are far from what was promised. Ensuring your environment is optimized for your peek needs and throttled down when you don’t need them is a full time job. Your cloud provider should conduct a monthly review of your consumption levels and be able to make changes to your resource needs based on your fluctuating business needs.
6. Moving to the cloud is easier than you think
Your current environment is hosted on-premise with your IT department. Do you know what that is costing you / your organization? As mentioned earlier, hosted cloud solutions will always be more cost effective. And just because things are running fine now doesn’t mean you should not consider alternatives. The migration from an on-premise hosting solution to a cloud one, if done right, can be painless and transparent. Don’t let the status quo stop you from taking advantages of the many cloud benefits.
7. Accessible anywhere, anytime
You’ve been asked to make changes to your website before Monday, but you’re about to head out to the cottage for the long weekend. No problem! With a cloud hosted Sitecore environment, logging in to your CMS instance while enjoying a lovely glass of wine by the dock is but a breeze.
8. Gain incredible insights
The notion of big data, machine learning and the Internet of Things garner much media attention, however it should not be understated that there are real and significant opportunities for organizations to consider the use of these new technologies for their own benefit.
How one leverages machine learning, data and analytics to understand the interactions customers have with your organization will only strengthen and make you better prepared to tackle an increasingly competitive landscape. With a cloud offering you have at your disposal, the ability to use computing power like never before to extract insight from information you never dreamed before possible. Sitecore is working towards releasing a machine learning module that will allow the analysis of large datasets from your CMS, enabling the ability to do predictive analysis.
The cloud’s advantages will only grow as technology becomes more pervasive in an ever changing world. With the ongoing rapid pace of technology enhancement, the associated demands of the business to take advantage of these capabilities and the breadth of skills and expertise to deploy and manage these complex environment, organizations benefit greatly in both total cost of operations as well as deep business value by moving to the cloud and partnering with a service provider.
