CMS In The Cloud

As long as customers keep raising the digital stakes, your IT team must be ready to deliver.

CMS In The Cloud

Rise above expectations, one experience at a time.

The IT team at The World Bank Group was struggling. They needed to get a handle on more than 3,000 websites published in different units of their organization, hosted by multiple providers, and managed by disconnected content platforms. Because they lacked a central way to govern and manage those sites, many were left unmaintained, opening them up to security and performance issues. In addition, during periods of high traffic — such as when they streamed their annual meeting sessions to web visitors — they experienced frequent site outages, interrupting the content experience for thousands of customers.

After decommissioning 1,800 sites due to branding compliance, security, and other issues, they consolidated their remaining websites under one managed cloud-based CMS — a move that resulted in significant improvements in performance, scale, and security, including the following: *

Almost 100% uptime, even during high-traffic events *

10–15% improvement in application performance *

Better security responsiveness

The group also moved to a more flexible, stable code deployment process and a consistent maintenance schedule with no downtime impact — all of which gave their IT team more time to produce the platforms their business units needed to best serve their customers while growing the business.

Meeting the digital experience demand.

Companies of all sizes are juggling higher customer demands for digital experiences. One minute you’re scaling your site to accommodate an increase in traffic, while the next, you’re checking on encryption and backups to be sure your customer data is protected. The sheer pace of these changes means your IT team has to work faster than ever to deliver new functionality to support customer expectations.

Customers want more from their digital experiences.

On average, consumers spend one-third of their day engaging with digital content.

54% of customers are less likely to purchase or recommend your product if the content isn’t relevant.

Almost 50% of consumers will stop engaging with your brand if content loads too slowly or is difficult to interact with.

Source: Adobe

But you’ll need to knock down what’s holding you back before you can move forward. If you host your CMS on premise, here are some of the biggest challenges you’ll need to overcome: *

Lack of a scalable, reliable hosting infrastructure *

Too much time spent launching new customer experiences *

Too much time on deployment and upgrades *

Inability to deliver contextually relevant content at scale *

Management of multiple vendors for software, infrastructure, or support

The best way to start is with a managed cloud-based CMS.

Four benefits of managed CMS in the cloud.

1. Speed. When IT can deploy code faster, the whole organization benefits. For example, thanks to testing and deployment automation — offered by DevOps tools, which are typically provided by managed cloud vendors — you can launch a new site for a geographic region in a day or two instead of in months. Or quickly recover from technology failures that would otherwise take hours.

Manulife, a financial services group, wanted to launch a new website that was focused on customer needs rather than on its own corporate structure. By using a managed cloud service provider to host and manage their site, the company was able to scale quickly and reduce the time to market for new services.

2. Governance. Governance is a challenge for any organization, but if you have a large company, it can get even more complicated. For example, if you’re a major financial institution or government organization, you can have dozens of departments with layers of regulations — each with different business objectives and different content needs.

But if all these departments use the same cloud-accessible CMS managed in a consistent way — complete with change management controls, planned maintenance windows, and structured release and upgrades — then you can better manage internal processes, and in turn deliver better experiences to your customers.

Philips wanted to build a new digital platform to empower its 500 content authors across the globe, while keeping the control they needed to maintain IT and content governance. To ensure they implemented a future-proof CMS that could grow with them, they moved from an on-premise hosting environment to a cloud-hosted system. As a result, they were able to speed up the release of new functionality while reducing total cost of ownership.

3. Security. Security is especially important in highly regulated industries like government, healthcare, and financial services. At minimum, your cloud provider should have certifications in ISO 27001, FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC-2, and GLBA to ensure compliance and keep your customers safe. A secure platform also reduces your risk of downtime due to a breach. And since any interruption of service will impact customer engagement, it’s important that your site is always available.

A managed cloud-based CMS provides you with several different layers of security: *

Physical security — controls who has access to data center facilities and servers *

Network security — includes built-in firewalls, network monitoring, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate support *

Data security — includes encryption, routine backups, backup distribution, and backup disposal *

Access security — secures both the cloud infrastructure and individual CMS instances

4. Scalability. A cloud-based CMS helps you easily scale up or down based on your business needs. For example, you can accommodate spikes in traffic or expand your content repository to handle your digital assets — all without having to worry about the cost of additional hardware and associated maintenance.

An extensible CMS platform makes it easy for you to integrate third-party cloud applications, so you can be sure you take the entire ecosystem into consideration when you’re designing customer experiences. You can also take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities that require the cloud, like the ability to create variations of your content and deliver the most relevant version to the right person regardless of channel, device, or screen.

Silicon Labs needed a website that could support the growth of their IoT business. The company, which has a Cloud First Initiative on all new projects, identified global scalability and the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of customers in a personalized way as necessities for its CMS. Once they implemented a cloud-based CMS, they were able to track 100 percent of their lead scores and saw a 150 percent lift in product-interest accuracy.

Best practices for migrating your CMS to the cloud.

Start small and build on successes. Identify a small, high-profile project that you can succeed with, and grow from there. For example, you might choose something with tight deadlines, such as a smaller web revamp, to demonstrate the advantage of speed.

Think security first. Start with your true security requirements and build on that so you don’t have to rework things later.

Define KPIs early, track regularly. Build a good understanding of what success looks like when you get to the cloud. Define business KPIs that you can measure as you’re migrating to the cloud, as well as during the run-time phase.

Perform pre- and post-migration health checks. Make sure your system performs just as well (or better) after migration as it does before.

Migrate fast, migrate stable. Use the help of a managed service provider to help you get your implementation running quickly, without worrying about downtime.

Choose the right partners. Make sure you have the right expertise on hand for your managed cloud deployment. The migration or integration team is made up of the customer, the managed services provider, and the customizer (site developer). Be sure you have a highly qualified, well-trained certified team of software architects on your customizer team.

Future-proof your customer experience.

As long as customers keep raising the digital stakes, your IT team must be ready to deliver. By making the move from an on-premise CMS to one hosted and managed in the cloud, you can build a secure, scalable digital foundation that helps you give customers the experiences they want today, and every day.

Adobe can help.

Adobe Experience Manager Sites, with Adobe Managed Services, can help you build the digital foundation you need to better meet your content management needs, maintain regulatory compliance, deliver innovation faster, and create secure and personalized experiences for any channel at scale.

Learn more about how a managed cloud-based CMS can help you keep up with the digital demands of your fast-moving customers.

Adobe can help.

“2018 Adobe Consumer Content Survey,” Adobe, 2018.

“Customer-first digital experiences,” Adobe Customer Story for Manulife, November 2017.

“IoT for a global market,” Adobe Customer Story for Silicon Labs, November 2017.

“Philips Accelerates the Creation of Digital Experiences with Integrated Data and Content,” Adobe Customer Story video for Philips, February 2017.