Scalability Is the New Norm: Three Reasons It’s High Time To Re-evaluate Your Infrastructure
At the best of times, making the business case for investment in technology is a challenging exercise for marketers. Their top priority is gaining the agility to change course based on market conditions and maneuver their organizations to best address changing customer needs. IT departments, on the other hand, have a different agenda, with stability, redundancy, security, and interoperability at the core.
The coronavirus outbreak has propelled these conflicting viewpoints into sharp focus, as scalability has taken on a whole new meaning. Planning and maintaining well-performing infrastructures in the midst of a crisis, as organisations far and wide need to shift to scaled and adaptable platforms, is often perceived as a complex and resource-consuming project.
The good news is that high-performing solutions that reliably enhance operations, are easy to deploy and maintain, and help improve capital cost efficiency, are available and affordable.
The benefits of implementing a flexible and easily scalable platform for diverse requirements have been explored in a London Research report commissioned by Kentico Software, a leading provider of digital experience and content management solutions. It looks at how Kentico’s content management system, hosted on Microsoft’s Azure platform, has impacted organizations worldwide, covering implementation considerations and business benefits (both financial and operational).
Chances are you’re currently trying to navigate the realities of technology-enabled business change, so here are three reasons you need to closely look at the performance of your current architecture and evaluate its ability to accommodate ebbs and flows in times of uncertainty.
Ensuring readiness for the future
While the volatility of business requirements and the speed at which organizations need to adapt are no longer novel concepts, the last few months have starkly reminded everyone that the future is far from certain. Future-proofing the business with the help of technology should be a key consideration for progressive organisations at any time, yet many found that their current infrastructure is not measuring up in the face of a crisis.
A cloud computing environment such as Azure can meet the needs for a flexible platform that supports plans to expand operations on demand, both by being easy to scale and by facilitating the transition into commerce, introduction of marketing automation or integration with other systems. Using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) enables organizations to scale server capacity with demand, and access functionality as required to accommodate business cycle fluctuations.
One of the agencies interviewed by London Research highlighted the limitations of their old system and hosting arrangement, which meant they struggled to keep up with the needs of their projects. This also had a negative impact on staff morale, as people felt they weren’t acquiring or applying new technology skills. Kentico in Azure allowed them to jump a whole generation of CMS development and ensure that performance didn’t degrade as geographical reach expanded.
Making integration and interoperability a reality
Both marketers and IT professionals acknowledge that not all integrations are created equal, and that integrating disparate systems is often the greatest barrier to martech implementation success. Facilitating and maintaining integrations with other platforms is a recurrent issue, as insufficiently integrated solutions end up crippling the efficiency and effectiveness organisations were trying to achieve in the first place.
The integration conundrum was reiterated by businesses London Research interviewed for this report. All interviewees found that Kentico in Azure made it easy for them to integrate with other systems and felt they didn’t even need to worry about it since everything was handled by the platform.
Improving operational efficiency
Development and operations teams have historically lived as separate functions, and progress was often encumbered by an erosion of trust between the two teams due to seemingly conflicting objectives. Errors caused by an over-reliance on manual tasks and human intervention contributed to this already strained relationship.
Implementing DevOps capabilities and capitalising on build, deployment, testing, and reporting automation is a key step towards successfully transitioning to a flexible infrastructure. Automated and scalable processes improve the speed and quality of deployments, and improve efficiency overall.
One of the key benefits of Kentico in Azure highlighted in the report was the ease of installation. Deployments are completely automated, minimizing downtime, and interviewees praised the system’s ability to build, test, and deploy the application and content without any human intervention.
The operational benefits reported are also significant. These include cost savings in both hosting and management, plus improved reliability, uptime, security, and scalability. One of the agencies interviewed reported a saving of some $12,000 a month on hosting alone.
The key takeaway: invest now
It’s never too late to future-proof your technology. Investing in a system that can handle increased throughput effectively in times of change can deliver significant business benefits. Scalability is no longer a desirable characteristic of a robust IT infrastructure, but a necessity. With every organization vying to get an edge over their competitors, increasing performance while delivering the same (or better) customer experience is a winning strategy.
To learn more, download the full Business Case for Kentico in Microsoft Azure report.