A
Alexander Shumarski
Guest
Marketers are busy people. It’s a constant balancing act—trying to do everything you can to the best of your ability with whatever limited resources you have. As a marketer myself, I get it.
That's why productivity is so important. Getting more things done means fewer things to worry about. Keeping a sharp focus on your goals means that there are fewer chances of being disrupted. Continued innovation translates into new opportunities to thrive. And yes, achieving marketing nirvana is possible when working together with IT to deliver better digital experiences that delight customers and disrupt industries.
The cloud can be a busy marketer’s best friend. Need to convince your CIO that embracing the cloud comes with multiple benefits and relatively few drawbacks? Here are a couple reasons why Sitefinity Cloud is the solution that will delight your customers, alleviate some burden from your IT team and boost your productivity.
Always-On Experiences
Today’s consumers demand always-on experiences. While we often carry phone chargers and power banks in our purses, we secretly dream of everlasting cell batteries, always-on, connected experiences and uninterrupted access to information and entertainment. Downtime is no longer an option.
To you, the marketer, downtime is one of your biggest enemies. A minute of downtime could translate into thousands of dollars of missed opportunities. Even if you are not as big as Amazon, which may have lost between $70 and $99 million during a one-hour Prime Day outage back in 2018, you should not settle for any downtime.
Sitefinity Cloud helps you mitigate the risk of downtime by reducing the chances of someone pulling the plug by mistake. Built on top of enterprise-grade infrastructure powered by Microsoft Azure, Sitefinity Cloud enables you to focus on managing the experience, and not on service availability. Always-on experiences are possible without large upfront investments and overcompensating for worst-case scenarios.
Lightning-Fast Multichannel Content Delivery
While we are on the topic of reducing the number of missed opportunities, it is worth looking at several symptoms that may have an adverse effect your marketing initiatives.
By digging deep into your performance dashboards and website metrics, you may find opportunities to improve bounce rates, engagement and conversions. Often, the culprit is not the page copy or the long form that puts off prospects but technical issues, like slow website speed and sluggish page load times. Segmenting your audience will point you in the right direction, but if you approach the problem holistically, by migrating your CMS to the cloud, you will be able to address the root cause of sluggish website performance.
Sitefinity Cloud has points of presence strategically located to shorten the distance between you and your customers. The Global Content Delivery Network ensures that both your dynamically generated content and your static media are available to anyone across the globe at speeds that are worth the ticket—regardless of the channel, device or touchpoint. With low latency and fast download times come improved engagement, conversions and customer satisfaction.
Performance, Redefined
Not all traffic spikes are predictable. Certainly, you can prepare for the annual shopping frenzy or the upcoming holiday season by asking IT to install more servers and overcompensate resources in an effort to guarantee good service availability. Even though this could be something that clashes with their priorities, given enough lead time and some budget to spend, they should be able to accommodate your request.
But… what if your content gets linked on Reddit or one of your social posts goes viral? The uncontrolled influx of visitors can bring your site to a standstill or even take it offline (or, as the internet so gently likes to put it, gives you the Hug of Death).
Would you risk customer satisfaction by failing to prepare? Remember, downtime is your enemy, and sluggish website performance is not your friend either. Keeping your website up and running regardless of the load can be a daunting challenge to deal with, especially when you rely on on-premises hosting.
Sitefinity Cloud provides autoscaling infrastructure to ensure site availability, speed and reliability even if you happen to end up under siege on Black Friday. Our engineering teams continuously monitor the performance of the cloud infrastructure and perform regular optimizations to the autoscaling rules to help you overachieve on those end-of-the-quarter KPIs.
Content Management at Scale
Whether you manage a handful of corporate websites or thousands of campaign pages, the powerful content management capabilities of the Sitefinity platform can quickly become your ally. Get to market faster and propel your brand farther by leveraging an intuitive content creation experience, with easy-to-use drag-and-drop page builders, support for virtually any content type plus multisite, multilingual and multichannel management tools straight out of the box.
Sitefinity CMS is recognized by leading analysts and loved by thousands of end users for its ease of use, extensibility and its ability to adapt to complex business requirements, as unique as they may be.
Empowered Independence
Sitefinity Cloud is designed to help marketers launch new digital experiences faster without the IT overhead often associated with day-to-day and strategic tasks. Content creation and content management across channels and websites is fast and intuitive and quickly becomes second nature to both novice and seasoned CMS users. Our latest release delivers even more capabilities that boost productivity and equip marketers with an arsenal of effective tools to stand tall and face every marketing challenge without fear.
Features such as granular user and role management, content publishing workflows and the ability to independently synchronize content between your staging environment and your live website result in improved brand consistency, elevated content governance, improved compliance and unmatched productivity.
Compliance and governance don’t come at the expense of innovation either. Digital marketers have access to intuitive campaign page builder, multi-page and rule-based forms. Built-in connectors to major CRM and marketing automation systems improve operational efficiency. Our users love Sitefinity for a reason, and Sitefinity Cloud offers yet another way to push your digital strategy towards success.
Continuous Innovation
Developers call it Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. But you could think of it as a never-ending line of opportunities to disrupt the market with new features, capabilities and product offerings. With CI/CD, bottlenecks and time-wasting are removed in favor of faster time to market, better testing and shorter product delivery cycles. This ultimately translates into less time waiting and more time selling.
Sitefinity Cloud is tightly integrated with its core hosting infrastructure to instantly equip developers with all the tools they need in order to embrace best practices, gain agility, harden security and improve productivity. With access to a truly extensible platform, developers can easily tailor the system to accommodate complex business requirements without blocking concurrent content, marketing and development initiatives. And that is a great example of how people in machines align efforts to help your marketing initiatives thrive.
Analytics + Personalization = Success
High-availability and unmatched performance are just two of the ingredients of a successful digital experience. You also need to be able to assess how well your digital experiences are performing and adjust as needed to ensure you’re doing the best you can by your customers.
With many content management systems, marketers are left in the dark with limited visibility on their audience’s journey through the sales funnel. While there are plenty of product offerings out there that aim at providing the visibility, personalization and A/B testing capabilities you may need, they may also add a level of complexity and financial burden that you may not want to deal with.
Sitefinity provides analytics, personalization and A/B testing capabilities out-of-the box to equip you with everything you need to make informed decisions. Our analytics and personalization suite comes standard with several product tiers and is (of course) easy to setup, manage and use.
Hardened Security
Security tends to fall under the jurisdiction of IT, but the reality is that marketing teams just as often feel the brunt of breaches when they do occur. After all, they are the ones who have to work on repairing relationships and restoring trust with customers and partners long after the breach is fixed and security is restored.
The reality is that in today’s digital world, security and privacy have become top of mind for many connected consumers. It is your duty to ensure that not only their personal information is protected, but they have access to tools to manage their privacy and the data you keep on record.
Sitefinity Cloud provides hardened security along with built-in tools and workflows to manage GDPR revoke requests. Personal data is obfuscated so developers will not get access to sensitive information when working on developing new features. Not only does Sitefinity leverage enterprise-grade infrastructure to host your experiences, but our technology stack leverages multiple intelligent layers of protection to ensure that bad actors cannot get in.
Additionally, machine learning and AI-powered systems constantly monitor incoming traffic and provide security recommendations. Common vectors of attack are automatically blocked at several stages and at different levels to protect your application. Sitefinity also provides tools to harden security from the outside in and inside out, plus it’s SOC2 Compliant, meaning that the platform has undergone rigorous security checks and applies best development and testing practices.
Sitefinity also protects against the top 10 industry-recognized exploits to mitigate the risk of security breaches and ensure that your customers’ data remains intact and safe.
Connect! Set! Go!
For a long time, content has been king. And, while this may still be true, data has risen through the ranks as a potential usurper—more and more organizations have started to rely on data to analyze, optimize and personalize the experience for their employees, customers and partners.
Gartner recommends that organizations should evaluate their requirements and protect their web content management investments by adopting digital experience platforms (DXP). A DXP is an array of integrated technologies that further empower digital transformation, enabling companies to deliver digital experiences that meet complex business requirements and use cases across different industries.
Sitefinity Cloud enables you to easily and seamlessly connect your CMS with these other technologies, with a broad array of data connectors used by 350+ ISVs and 10,000+ enterprises. When integrated with your digital experience platform, our data connectivity solutions enable you to pull data from any source and turn it into a powerful asset.
Sitefinity Cloud offers multiple protection mechanisms to help address security concerns and improve business metrics down the road.
Plays Nice with Others
One of the main differentiators between on-premises and cloud-based hosting options is that Sitefintiy Cloud plays nice with multiple external systems such as Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce and other marketing automation and CRM platforms. This enables you to create connected experiences, where customer data is fed through the funnel to optimize interactions. Leveraging built-in integrations ensure that you get to market fast and avoid costly development cycles. That way, your team can focus on extending the system to support other business priorities instead Sitefinity provides a solid ground to build upon, and comes with multiple partner integrations to help you jumpstart your ecommerce or site search initiatives.
Support?
Sitefinity Cloud provides multiple reporting and management dashboards to enable your IT team to proactively monitor system performance. And, since we are committing to a market-leading service level availability, we will also monitor the cloud infrastructure to make sure that your website remains live and snappy at all times.
Downtime is not your friend, remember? So, in the unlikely event of unexpected rough air in the clouds, our engineers will continue to work with your IT to ensure that optimal performance is restored as soon as possible. We are committing to a 24/7 support resources availability, just like you have committed to providing the best possible experiences to your prospects, loyal customers and supportive partners.
Summing It All Up
Congratulations on making it this far! There are a million other benefits of using Progress Managed Services to manage and protect your digital experiences as they grow and mature. We aim to make Sitefinity Cloud is a truly stellar service that continues to give you the agility you need without the added weight of managing complex infrastructure.
Sitefinity Clouds delivers the perfect blend of:
Contact us today if you are ready to elevate your digital experiences to the next level.
Continue reading...
That's why productivity is so important. Getting more things done means fewer things to worry about. Keeping a sharp focus on your goals means that there are fewer chances of being disrupted. Continued innovation translates into new opportunities to thrive. And yes, achieving marketing nirvana is possible when working together with IT to deliver better digital experiences that delight customers and disrupt industries.
The cloud can be a busy marketer’s best friend. Need to convince your CIO that embracing the cloud comes with multiple benefits and relatively few drawbacks? Here are a couple reasons why Sitefinity Cloud is the solution that will delight your customers, alleviate some burden from your IT team and boost your productivity.
Always-On Experiences
Today’s consumers demand always-on experiences. While we often carry phone chargers and power banks in our purses, we secretly dream of everlasting cell batteries, always-on, connected experiences and uninterrupted access to information and entertainment. Downtime is no longer an option.
To you, the marketer, downtime is one of your biggest enemies. A minute of downtime could translate into thousands of dollars of missed opportunities. Even if you are not as big as Amazon, which may have lost between $70 and $99 million during a one-hour Prime Day outage back in 2018, you should not settle for any downtime.
Sitefinity Cloud helps you mitigate the risk of downtime by reducing the chances of someone pulling the plug by mistake. Built on top of enterprise-grade infrastructure powered by Microsoft Azure, Sitefinity Cloud enables you to focus on managing the experience, and not on service availability. Always-on experiences are possible without large upfront investments and overcompensating for worst-case scenarios.
| Summary: Sitefinity Cloud helps mitigate the risk of downtime and provides market-leading service level availability. |
Lightning-Fast Multichannel Content Delivery
While we are on the topic of reducing the number of missed opportunities, it is worth looking at several symptoms that may have an adverse effect your marketing initiatives.
By digging deep into your performance dashboards and website metrics, you may find opportunities to improve bounce rates, engagement and conversions. Often, the culprit is not the page copy or the long form that puts off prospects but technical issues, like slow website speed and sluggish page load times. Segmenting your audience will point you in the right direction, but if you approach the problem holistically, by migrating your CMS to the cloud, you will be able to address the root cause of sluggish website performance.
Sitefinity Cloud has points of presence strategically located to shorten the distance between you and your customers. The Global Content Delivery Network ensures that both your dynamically generated content and your static media are available to anyone across the globe at speeds that are worth the ticket—regardless of the channel, device or touchpoint. With low latency and fast download times come improved engagement, conversions and customer satisfaction.
Summary: Sitefinity Cloud is available in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, offering a global content delivery network for instant content and media delivery. |
Performance, Redefined
Not all traffic spikes are predictable. Certainly, you can prepare for the annual shopping frenzy or the upcoming holiday season by asking IT to install more servers and overcompensate resources in an effort to guarantee good service availability. Even though this could be something that clashes with their priorities, given enough lead time and some budget to spend, they should be able to accommodate your request.
But… what if your content gets linked on Reddit or one of your social posts goes viral? The uncontrolled influx of visitors can bring your site to a standstill or even take it offline (or, as the internet so gently likes to put it, gives you the Hug of Death).
Would you risk customer satisfaction by failing to prepare? Remember, downtime is your enemy, and sluggish website performance is not your friend either. Keeping your website up and running regardless of the load can be a daunting challenge to deal with, especially when you rely on on-premises hosting.
Sitefinity Cloud provides autoscaling infrastructure to ensure site availability, speed and reliability even if you happen to end up under siege on Black Friday. Our engineering teams continuously monitor the performance of the cloud infrastructure and perform regular optimizations to the autoscaling rules to help you overachieve on those end-of-the-quarter KPIs.
| Summary: Sitefinity Cloud instantly throttles up to add computing power and meet the demand during spikes in traffic and seasonal traffic fluctuations. |
Content Management at Scale
Whether you manage a handful of corporate websites or thousands of campaign pages, the powerful content management capabilities of the Sitefinity platform can quickly become your ally. Get to market faster and propel your brand farther by leveraging an intuitive content creation experience, with easy-to-use drag-and-drop page builders, support for virtually any content type plus multisite, multilingual and multichannel management tools straight out of the box.
Sitefinity CMS is recognized by leading analysts and loved by thousands of end users for its ease of use, extensibility and its ability to adapt to complex business requirements, as unique as they may be.
Summary: Powerful content management and robust cloud infrastructure work in synergy to deliver snappy websites and a productive content management environment. |
Empowered Independence
Sitefinity Cloud is designed to help marketers launch new digital experiences faster without the IT overhead often associated with day-to-day and strategic tasks. Content creation and content management across channels and websites is fast and intuitive and quickly becomes second nature to both novice and seasoned CMS users. Our latest release delivers even more capabilities that boost productivity and equip marketers with an arsenal of effective tools to stand tall and face every marketing challenge without fear.
Features such as granular user and role management, content publishing workflows and the ability to independently synchronize content between your staging environment and your live website result in improved brand consistency, elevated content governance, improved compliance and unmatched productivity.
Compliance and governance don’t come at the expense of innovation either. Digital marketers have access to intuitive campaign page builder, multi-page and rule-based forms. Built-in connectors to major CRM and marketing automation systems improve operational efficiency. Our users love Sitefinity for a reason, and Sitefinity Cloud offers yet another way to push your digital strategy towards success.
Summary: Sitefinity Cloud enables marketers to independently create and manage content across channels with limited reliance on IT. |
Continuous Innovation
Developers call it Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. But you could think of it as a never-ending line of opportunities to disrupt the market with new features, capabilities and product offerings. With CI/CD, bottlenecks and time-wasting are removed in favor of faster time to market, better testing and shorter product delivery cycles. This ultimately translates into less time waiting and more time selling.
Sitefinity Cloud is tightly integrated with its core hosting infrastructure to instantly equip developers with all the tools they need in order to embrace best practices, gain agility, harden security and improve productivity. With access to a truly extensible platform, developers can easily tailor the system to accommodate complex business requirements without blocking concurrent content, marketing and development initiatives. And that is a great example of how people in machines align efforts to help your marketing initiatives thrive.
Summary: CI/CD translates into shorter release cycles and faster time to market. That means more innovation and a better user experience! |
Analytics + Personalization = Success
High-availability and unmatched performance are just two of the ingredients of a successful digital experience. You also need to be able to assess how well your digital experiences are performing and adjust as needed to ensure you’re doing the best you can by your customers.
With many content management systems, marketers are left in the dark with limited visibility on their audience’s journey through the sales funnel. While there are plenty of product offerings out there that aim at providing the visibility, personalization and A/B testing capabilities you may need, they may also add a level of complexity and financial burden that you may not want to deal with.
Sitefinity provides analytics, personalization and A/B testing capabilities out-of-the box to equip you with everything you need to make informed decisions. Our analytics and personalization suite comes standard with several product tiers and is (of course) easy to setup, manage and use.
Summary: Sitefinity Cloud arms you with analytics super powers so you can discover and segment audiences, render 360 customer contact profiles, tailor messaging and calculate campaign ROI. |
Hardened Security
Security tends to fall under the jurisdiction of IT, but the reality is that marketing teams just as often feel the brunt of breaches when they do occur. After all, they are the ones who have to work on repairing relationships and restoring trust with customers and partners long after the breach is fixed and security is restored.
The reality is that in today’s digital world, security and privacy have become top of mind for many connected consumers. It is your duty to ensure that not only their personal information is protected, but they have access to tools to manage their privacy and the data you keep on record.
Sitefinity Cloud provides hardened security along with built-in tools and workflows to manage GDPR revoke requests. Personal data is obfuscated so developers will not get access to sensitive information when working on developing new features. Not only does Sitefinity leverage enterprise-grade infrastructure to host your experiences, but our technology stack leverages multiple intelligent layers of protection to ensure that bad actors cannot get in.
Additionally, machine learning and AI-powered systems constantly monitor incoming traffic and provide security recommendations. Common vectors of attack are automatically blocked at several stages and at different levels to protect your application. Sitefinity also provides tools to harden security from the outside in and inside out, plus it’s SOC2 Compliant, meaning that the platform has undergone rigorous security checks and applies best development and testing practices.
Sitefinity also protects against the top 10 industry-recognized exploits to mitigate the risk of security breaches and ensure that your customers’ data remains intact and safe.
Summary: Sitefinity Cloud offers multiple protection mechanisms to help address security concerns and improve business metrics down the road. |
Connect! Set! Go!
For a long time, content has been king. And, while this may still be true, data has risen through the ranks as a potential usurper—more and more organizations have started to rely on data to analyze, optimize and personalize the experience for their employees, customers and partners.
Gartner recommends that organizations should evaluate their requirements and protect their web content management investments by adopting digital experience platforms (DXP). A DXP is an array of integrated technologies that further empower digital transformation, enabling companies to deliver digital experiences that meet complex business requirements and use cases across different industries.
Sitefinity Cloud enables you to easily and seamlessly connect your CMS with these other technologies, with a broad array of data connectors used by 350+ ISVs and 10,000+ enterprises. When integrated with your digital experience platform, our data connectivity solutions enable you to pull data from any source and turn it into a powerful asset.
Sitefinity Cloud offers multiple protection mechanisms to help address security concerns and improve business metrics down the road.
Summary: If you need to integrate multiple disparate systems into a single cohesive experience, Sitefinity Cloud enables you to remove multiple data silos and improve operational efficiency. |
Plays Nice with Others
One of the main differentiators between on-premises and cloud-based hosting options is that Sitefintiy Cloud plays nice with multiple external systems such as Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce and other marketing automation and CRM platforms. This enables you to create connected experiences, where customer data is fed through the funnel to optimize interactions. Leveraging built-in integrations ensure that you get to market fast and avoid costly development cycles. That way, your team can focus on extending the system to support other business priorities instead Sitefinity provides a solid ground to build upon, and comes with multiple partner integrations to help you jumpstart your ecommerce or site search initiatives.
Summary: Sitefinity Cloud enables you to get to market faster and reduce development costs by giving you access to built-in connectors and valuable partner integrations. |
Support?
Sitefinity Cloud provides multiple reporting and management dashboards to enable your IT team to proactively monitor system performance. And, since we are committing to a market-leading service level availability, we will also monitor the cloud infrastructure to make sure that your website remains live and snappy at all times.
Downtime is not your friend, remember? So, in the unlikely event of unexpected rough air in the clouds, our engineers will continue to work with your IT to ensure that optimal performance is restored as soon as possible. We are committing to a 24/7 support resources availability, just like you have committed to providing the best possible experiences to your prospects, loyal customers and supportive partners.
Summary: With Sitefinity Cloud, you get access to 24/7 tech support to ensure optimal system performance. |
Summing It All Up
Congratulations on making it this far! There are a million other benefits of using Progress Managed Services to manage and protect your digital experiences as they grow and mature. We aim to make Sitefinity Cloud is a truly stellar service that continues to give you the agility you need without the added weight of managing complex infrastructure.
Sitefinity Clouds delivers the perfect blend of:
- High availability
- Proven performance
- Multi-tier, autoscaling infrastructure
- Powerful multisite and multilingual content management capabilities, ecommerce and partner integrations
- Analytics, personalization and A/B testing out of the box
- Built-in connectors to major CRM systems, extensibility and data connectivity
- Multichannel content delivery
- Hardened security, user management, content governance tools and more.
Contact us today if you are ready to elevate your digital experiences to the next level.
Continue reading...