13 considerations for deploying an experience platform

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13 considerations for deploying an experience platformEvaluate cloud and on-premises deployment options in context of your business situation

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White paper // 13 considerations for deploying an experience platform

Contents

Introduction �� 2

Key considerations for the web director and digital marketer �� 2

Key considerations for the IT pro �� 4

Next steps �� 5

About Sitecore �� 6

Published 04/18� © 2018 Sitecore Corporation A/S� All rights reserved� Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S in the U�S� and other countries� All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners� This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore� Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore�

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IntroductionCongratulations! You’ve made a decision to either upgrade, migrate to, or invest in an entirely new customer experience management platform� You’ve driven consensus within your organization around requirements, evaluated solutions, investigated interdependencies with existing technology, and have chosen a path forward� To ensure the success of your investment, you’ll want to put some thought into deployment approaches� After all, the advantages of deploying in the cloud continue to grow, you’ve got legacy applications and data with which to integrate, and your marketing team is likely using a variety of applications and services you might not even know about�

Where should you start? Since the customer experience is where everything you’ve done before and during deployment must come together for a positive outcome, it makes the most sense to start there—with the quality of experience that you seek for your web pages, videos, emails, and other marketing content targeted for prospects and customers�

By working backward from the customer experience, you can gain clarity on where your systems need to align� You will identify where performance and availability is critical, how you can ensure automated action without compromising security, how you can scale and grow for the future, and how you can best deploy a centralized platform that enhances the productivity of your team�

In this white paper, we’ll discuss what you’ll need to consider before deploying an experience platform as we shed light on the various options you may have (namely, cloud or on-premises deployment)� One thing to know is that you, the customer, do have options, including potentially deploying a hybrid solution that combines environments to meet your organization’s unique needs�

Because different roles have different priorities, we’ve categorized our considerations according to the audiences who have a stake in your deployment decisions� While you work backward from the customer experience, you’ll want to think about deployment concerns from the perspective of the following stakeholders:

■ The web director:

A decision maker. Your web directors and managers will advocate for an easy-to-use, scalable platform that enables segmentation, personalization, and targeting, and works seamlessly across channels� And, of course, they’ll want a process-friendly system that is highly secure and has minimal downtime�

■ The IT pro:

A decision maker. Many of the decisions, such as cloud versus on premises, and how best to adhere to data privacy policies and compliance requirements, will be made here� These decisions will be made easier if they are collaborative with the other stakeholders and guided by a common goal of maximizing the quality and effectiveness of the customer experience�

■ The digital marketer:

An influencer. The customer experience will be heightened by a successful user experience� Your new platform must enable every marketer or user at your company to easily implement programs—consistently and as planned� Ideally, your marketers should be able to know and act on the context of how customers are interacting with your brand over time and in real time, across all channels� That way, marketers can offer the most relevant content in context of the audience’s unique experience�

The digital marketer or other system user will have most of the same considerations as the web director, and should be consulted as much as possible as well as be involved in testing and implementation�

Below is a breakdown of the considerations for each decision maker, plus some insight on deployment alternatives�

Key considerations for the web director and digital marketer

1. Scalability

If your organization regularly engages in high-volume marketing campaigns or events, or even seasonal campaigns that drive considerable traffic to your

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website and other digital properties, you need the flexibility to shape your bandwidth and computing capacity�

Deploying an on-premises solution may mean you need to invest in additional physical servers to accommodate increasing amounts of traffic and avoid overloads and failures� The major downside is that the additional hardware capacity will only be needed occasionally and therefore yields a poor ROI�

With a cloud-based solution (PaaS or IaaS), you can scale on demand much more efficiently under pay-for-what-you-use arrangements� In other words, you’re better able to cope when you suddenly have huge product launches or holiday marketing campaigns� By automatically scaling up your web operations to cope with increased customer loads, your target customer experience will benefit, too� And the value of not having to explain to marketing why the website “fell over” when their social campaign went viral—priceless� Advantage: Cloud�

2. Geographical requirements

A similar consideration is whether your organization targets customers over a large region nationally or internationally� If it does, your company can utilize multiple content delivery networks (CDNs)—large distributed data centers across the internet—for a static website (generalized content)� This may allow your on-premises solution to perform well globally� Your CDN servers will likely be close to your customers, so content latency is less of an issue�

But if your content is more targeted and personalized—which generally provides a better customer experience—CDNs become less important� So a cloud-based solution can offer better speed and performance� Deployed in the cloud, an experience platform such as the Sitecore® Experience Platform™ (XP) is accessible from virtually any location, and multiple farms can be set up for content delivery� Should one farm fail, requests are automatically rerouted to other farms� Advantage: Cloud�

3. Quality assurance and user acceptance testing

Testing services and support for PaaS solutions are rapidly improving, and in some cases offer richer test

environments in the cloud than those on premises� The ability to load test your application by creating a high-volume testing scenario in a cloud environment means you can ramp up test load volume far in excess of what you’re likely to encounter “in the wild�” It’s also easier to quickly redeploy compute capacity to different server blueprints, in order to reconfigure your QA/UAT/Dev environments as you see fit�

However, an on-premises solution will allow your testers to work in a stable environment that takes advantage of existing IT investments� The nature of your testing methodologies may better suit a fixed environment that is used continually, rather than occasional peak-load bench-testing� Advantage: Either, depending on test scenarios�

4. Application feature deployment

Not having to worry about getting the latest application version or upgrade is, well, awesome� But for most customer experience platforms at this time, application version control remains a challenge—either in the cloud or on premises� Deploying patches and product upgrades requires planning, resourcing, and testing� SaaS offerings update all customers at the same time, and are responsible for the integrity of each feature release� However, this also means you lose control of when you want to deploy new features� In a PaaS or IaaS environment, you control when your application updates and can ensure you have the testing cycles in place to assure your business customers that the new release introduces no breaking changes to their customer experience� Advantage: Cloud, balancing control, and ease of management based on cloud type�

5. Speed of deployment

Without the need for building and deploying physical server infrastructure for scalability, and less need for IT involvement, the deployment of a cloud solution will usually be simpler and faster� In fact, many say that in today’s “experience” market, where first-to-market wins, the cloud can be the difference between first and second place� Advantage: Cloud�

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6. Your three- to five-year growth strategy

Before deploying an experience platform, consider your growth strategy for the next three to five years� Is your organization anticipating rapid growth? What kind of volatility or seasonality is your business likely to be subject to? Having the flexibility to expand rapidly—and indeed, scale back just as quickly if necessary—provides you with the agility to support the demands of the business� An upfront investment in fixed infrastructure has the profound disadvantage of not being able to be readily reversed in the event of a business downturn� A cloud-based solution will enable you to scale more quickly and easily and provide you with more flexibility in the event those three- to five-year plans don’t stay to plan� Advantage: Cloud�

Key considerations for the IT pro7. Cost

The cost of an experience platform is obviously part of the equation here but the cost of deploying and maintaining infrastructure must be considered as well� Deploying an on-premises solution often requires purchasing additional servers and other infrastructure, which must be installed and network configured� This increases deployment costs, and also brings the likelihood that your new infrastructure is often not fully utilized�

Moreover, the recurring IT costs for administration and maintenance will also be higher� Generally, you will find that deploying a cloud solution reduces upfront costs and capital expenditures overall� Advantage: Cloud�

Source: BAASS

The cost equationGenerally, you’ll �nd that deploying a cloud solution reduces upfront costs and capital expenditures overall.

Customization &implementation

Hardware

IT personnel

Maintenance

Training

Ongoing costs

■ Apply �xes, patches, upgrade

■ Downtime

■ Performance tuning

■ Rewrite customizations

■ Rewrite integrations

■ Upgrade dependent applications

■ Ongoing burden on IT

■ Maintain/upgrade hardware

■ Maintain/upgrade network

■ Maintain/upgrade security

■ Maintain/upgrade database

Ongoing costs

■ Subscription fee

■ Training

■ Con�guration

On premises Cloud computing9% Software licenses 68% Subscription fee

Implementation,customization, & training

http://www.plus.ca/blog/bid/88138/The-Cost-of-On-Premise-Vs-On-Demand-Solutions

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8. Systems integration and compatibility

For an on-premises deployment, the hardware you use can be shared with other internal systems� Systems integration and compatibility with development tools will likely be smoother� Connectivity of data systems may be less complicated, as all data is stored within your organization� And your IT staff has more control over the platform environment and supporting infrastructure�

Integrating your systems via a cloud deployment (IaaS as well as PaaS) is a process that is improving, and less hardware is involved—you simply don’t need as much� But you have less control and supervision over the implementation process, and integrating your data systems takes more planning and effort� Advantage: On premises�

9. Development and Devops

Obviously, your developers will have more local control with an on-premises deployment, as well� And the way your development operations environment works will be less affected� Solution providers such as Sitecore, however, have prioritized their efforts to “fit in” to a customer’s Devops environment and to adhere to existing customer development standards� So this consideration is less clear cut� Advantage: Either�

10. Data security and privacy

Similarly, data security and privacy considerations are not clear cut either� Your data security is heavily dependent on the security of your IT environment� An on-premises deployment will keep all data within your organization safe as it is� Likewise for your data privacy, which will continue to be governed by the policies your organization has in place�

Meanwhile, with a cloud deployment, your data will be moving in and out of the cloud� But cloud services such as Microsoft Azure offer sophisticated security technologies that reduce risk, as well as privacy policies that are as strict as or stricter than those of many organizations� Advantage: Either�

11. Data compliance internationally

Companies that do business internationally recognize that data compliance can be complicated� That’s because governments internationally regulate the data systems located within their jurisdictions, and regulations also may vary per industry�

With a cloud-based solution, you may not even know where your data resides� However, cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure have made compliance much less of a concern by adhering to most international and industry regulations� Advantage: Cloud�

12. Availability

The pros and cons go both ways here� As we’ve discussed, high availability with an on-premises solution may require investing in additional infrastructure and CDNs to serve large, broad, or international audiences�

With a cloud solution, you need an always-on internet connection, plus a provider with minimal downtime and strong service-level agreements for quickly fixing any outage� Advantage: Either�

13. Replication, redundancy, and disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is simply more problematic with an on-premises solution� A cloud-based solution offers widely dispersed and redundant data centers, helping ensure that not all environments are affected by a regional disaster—no matter how severe the local impact might be� Cloud computing delivers faster recovery times and multisite availability at a fraction of the cost of conventional disaster recovery� Advantage: Cloud�

Next stepsMost IT experts will likely agree that cloud solutions have more upside than on-premises solutions� However, while cloud technologies and platforms continue to mature and improve, IT change can be disruptive, and each business or organization’s circumstances must be considered individually�

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The Sitecore® Experience Platform™ can be deployed in a variety of environments, depending on your business and infrastructure needs, and has a flexible approach to deployment, as follows:

■ Sitecore® Cloud: You can deploy Sitecore XP, the Sitecore® Experience Manager™ (XM), and Sitecore Experience Commerce™ in a platform-as-a-service cloud with Microsoft Azure by either hosting it yourself, having your certified Solution Partner host it for you, or having Sitecore manage hosting� Customers can combine this with our consumption-based pricing according to the volume of visits to your Sitecore-powered site� Ideal for customers who budget for software as an annual expense or who have volatile traffic patterns�

■ Sitecore on premises: You can install Sitecore on your own servers� Customers typically purchase Sitecore with a perpetual license, which is priced by the number of software installations in your environment; consumption-based pricing is also available� Ideal for customers who budget for software as a capital investment or up-front expense�

■ Hybrid approach: You can deploy some of your Sitecore installation (for instance, your content delivery component) on Azure and the rest on your own servers� This option gives you flexibility and, depending on how much you may need to scale up in Azure, your pricing is either through a consumption-based or perpetual license�

For more details on Sitecore Cloud, see our white paper “Why and how to deploy Sitecore® XP on Microsoft® Azure�” Alternatively, you can reach us via:

Email: sitecore�com/contact-us Phone: sitecore�com/phone Chat: sitecore�com/chat

Or request a demo here�

If you need further information on Sitecore Cloud, visit Sitecore Documentation, give your account manager a call, or check out Sitecore training to book an online or in-person training session�

About SitecoreSitecore is the global leader in experience management software that combines content management, commerce, and customer insights� The Sitecore Experience Cloud™ empowers marketers to deliver personalized content in real time and at scale across every channel—before, during, and after a sale� More than 5,200 brands—including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, Dow Chemical, and L’Oréal—have trusted Sitecore to deliver the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive revenue�

Visit us at www�sitecore�com�

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13 considerations for deploying an experience platform