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If you’re part of the team responsible for your company’s digital experience strategy but are not a technical person, you may find your eyes glassing over when the developers and IT leaders start discussing whether or not it’s time to move to the cloud. You may think as long as the digital experience has all the features and functionality you need and want, you don’t really care how the proverbial sausage is made.
But maybe you should.
Whether or not you build your digital experience with a cloud-first mentality could have a significant impact on the performance, scalability, security and maintenance of your omnichannel presence.
Cloud Nativity 101
To understand why, you first need to understand what cloud native applications are.
Let’s start by looking at the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) definition of cloud-native technologies and break it down line by line:
“Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds.
Investment in building a cloud-native digital experience is an investment in the future. You will be able to easily scale, modify, update and improve your omnichannel experiences as needed so what you are delivering to your customer is always the most modern, engaging experience.
Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.
You don’t have to understand what each of these things is; you just need to think of them as the building blocks used to build the entire digital experience.
These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable.
Because your digital experience is built on building blocks, it’s easier to fix, modify, improve and even troubleshoot because you don’t have to take the whole system apart or take it down to fix, modernize, update or improve it.
Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.”
Traditional IT operating models aren’t very flexible, while a cloud-native experience is the opposite. It enables engineers to automate tasks, frequently change and update the app and systems and easily monitor and react to the changing environment. Building for and running your digital experience in the cloud means it is scalable and flexible.
The TL;DR is that cloud-native applications are the most modern way to build, test and deploy your digital experience. Because of this, you see all the benefits you would expect from a modern approach – less downtime (if any), better performance, more secure applications, experiences that can scale, less manpower and overall faster time to market.
Case Study
Take InvestorCom, a UK-based corporate and investor communications firm that creates and manages websites for more than 40 companies listed on the London stock exchange as well as other exchanges across the world. InvestorCom had recently migrated to the cloud, butwere using a custom-built solution to build websites for clients in HTML and then managing Azure servers internally. The approach required more than 40 developers and designers on staff and was not scalable.
Since InvestorCom completely manages the sites for clients, providing a worry-free experience is paramount. InvestorCom decided Progress® Sitefinity® Cloud, a fully managed PaaS hosted by Progress in Microsoft Azure, would provide their team with an intuitive, user-friendly CMS that makes it easy to create and manage client websites without having to monitor servers or do any coding.
Additionally, in many instances, publicly traded companies will need information to go live when the market opens. Having the ability to schedule new content and changes means the InvestorCom team doesn’t need to pull long nights or early mornings in the office to ensure it gets published.
What’s more, with Sitefinity Cloud, InvestorCom is able to do with 3 employees what used to take them 40. They’ve streamlined their processes and become exponentially more efficient and scalable.
So next time you’re in a meeting to discuss your digital transformation and the technical team starts in on their portion of the project, don’t tune them out. If they are not considering a cloud-native approach to your digital experience, ask them why. Ask them if they feel they can get all the same benefits with the traditional IT model in the same amount of time. And when they tell you that cloud is definitely the way to go, you can let them once again talk amongst themselves and you can start imagining all of the new features and functionality a cloud-first approach will allow them to implement with all of their time they used to spend elsewhere.
Learn how the Sitefinity Cloud can turbocharge your digital experience strategy at progress.com.
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