Why move to the cloud? Nearly every kind digital solution and service provider is touting cloud migration nowadays—and with good reason. Cloud-based architecture has become increasingly popular among businesses of all shapes and sizes, from SMBs to enterprise organizations. And as such, most leading providers in the digital and customer experience space have been introducing software as a service (SaaS) versions of their platforms and applications. The cloud can have many benefits, including increased scalability, enhanced security, improved performance, and often a reduction in the total cost of ownership. In this blog, we’ll take a look at migrating to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service by addressing the three big questions you may (or should) be asking yourself:
- Why move to AEM as a Cloud Service?
- Why do it now?
- Who should I select as my strategic partner in this effort?
So let’s dive in and start with number one.
1. Why move to AEM as a Cloud Service?
AEM as a Cloud Service is a cloud-based version of Adobe’s content management system. It’s a fully-managed, cloud-native implementation of AEM that is delivered as a SaaS solution. AEM as a Cloud Service offers a range of benefits for businesses that want to streamline their digital experience management processes, including:
- Scalability: Easily accommodates businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It can scale with your solutions—and do so fairly easily.
- Security: Adobe’s cloud services are built with enterprise-grade security features and comply with industry standards, providing robust protection for your digital assets and data.
- Simplified management: As a fully managed service, AEM as a Cloud Service eliminates the need for IT staff to manage and maintain servers, ensuring that you can focus on delivering a great digital experience. Less upkeep and troubleshooting means more time and budget for evolution, experimentation, and overall improvement of your solutions for better customer experience and increased KPIs.
- Faster time to market: You can quickly launch new digital experiences and content with a range of out-of-the-box features and integrations.
- Flexibility: A flexible and extensible architecture enables you to create and deliver tailored digital experiences that meet your specific needs.
- Reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO): AEM as a Cloud Service can make a serious impact on your TCO. Here’s a few ways how:
- Infrastructure and maintenance costs: Reduce or eliminate your dependency on infrastructure and hardware, as Adobe will be responsible for maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure.
- Licensing costs: A subscription-based pricing model means that you’ll only pay for the services you use.
- Personnel costs: You may be able to reduce personnel costs associated with IT maintenance and management, and be able to free up internal IT personnel to focus on other business initiatives.
- Faster time-to-market: Quicker deployment of websites and digital experiences means a reduction in development and testing costs. Additionally, faster updates and feature releases lead to a faster time-to-market and reduced overall costs.
- Upgrades and updates: No more upgrades. Seamless updates. Say goodbye to the big upgrade budgeting decisions.
As you can see, there are some great reasons why you should consider a move to AEM as a Cloud Service. Of course, all businesses are unique so the applicability will vary, but it’s more than likely that you’ll see a number of benefits from this shift.
2. Why should you make the move to cloud now?
The longer you wait, the larger, more time-consuming, and expensive the effort may be. Build-up of technical debt, new properties or content (and which would need to be migrated), and additional upgrades between now and the migration could all be factors. In terms of reducing your TCO, the sooner you embark on this migration, the sooner you can break even on migration costs—and enjoy significant savings.
Lastly, it’s more than likely that Adobe (as well as other CMS/DX/CX platforms) will phase out on-prem and non-managed cloud solutions and eventually move to a cloud/SaaS only licensing model. This could create a serious time crunch both from a licensing perspective and a technical/support perspective.
Moving to the cloud sooner rather than later puts you ahead of, and eliminates, these issues and allows you to enjoy the benefits such as focusing more on evolution of customer experience and organizational goals.
3. Who should I select as my strategic partner in this effort?
It’s important to find a partner that has strong capabilities which match your needs and has the chops not just to perform the migration itself, but to act consultatively and engage your team productively to reach a fantastic outcome. If you have follow-up initiatives on your roadmap, that partner would then have context and experience with your solution. Having that knowledge of your business will enable your partner to act as an extension of your team, when and where you need it. So, picking the right partner upfront is certainly important!
As an Adobe Gold Partner for 13 years, Concentrix has completed hundreds of mission-critical Adobe projects for many of Adobe’s largest customers. As part of those initiatives, we’ve also developed proprietary tools and technology to expedite activities like cloud migrations and ensure successful execution.
With our unique end-to-end capabilities, deep knowledge of the full suite of Adobe’s ecosystem, and experience relating to your exact industry, we’re prepared for whatever factors may be unique and important to your business as part of your cloud migration strategy.
So, there you have it—some answers to the big questions about migrating to AEM as a Cloud Service. We’d love to hear from you on how we can help your team achieve your goals and reap the benefits of moving to the cloud. And we’d love to answer any additional questions you may have!
Jonah Burstein
Lead Solution Consultant
