Sitecore being an experience management software provider has expanded its partnership benefits with Microsoft, and here’s the good news, users will get to experience native Azure support for the entire Sitecore 9 solution including the awesome Experience Manager (XM), Experience Platform (XP), and Sitecore Commerce. By hosting Sitecore 9 on Azure PaaS, you will gain reduced infrastructure complexities and the ability to run your applications on multiple channels.
About PaaS
Platform-as-a-Service is often known as PaaS. It is a category of cloud computing that provides the platform and the environment to build applications and services. PaaS can develop various applications, from basic to complex with its infrastructure that consists of servers, storage, and networking components. Additionally, it also has the capabilities to deliver complete lifecycle support for your applications, from building, testing, deploying, and managing to updates.
When enterprises decide to utilize the PaaS solution, they get cost savings and stay away from the complexities often associated with buying and managing software licenses, application infrastructure and middleware, and even development tools and other resources. One of the main advantages of choosing the PaaS solution is that you get to manage your own applications and services, leaving the rest of concerns for the cloud service provider to manage.
PaaS is one of the proven solutions that will enable you to experience fast speed and agility, improved scalability and resilience, and also allow cost saving.
Getting to know Azure PaaS
Microsoft’s Azure offers a suite of collected integrated services including analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web services. Additionally, Azure is powered with the security parameters that are ideal for supporting your enterprise and your data, allowing you to use your resources adequately.
Using Azure PaaS will allow you to focus on application innovation and avoid the complexity of building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure and also eliminate the need to perform IT tasks such as patching, networking, and server management.
Azure PaaS will also give you options to integrate with other development tools, deploy changes quickly, run multiple site versions at one time, backing-up sites, run development tests, complete scale testing, and move to production with zero downtime and automatically scale resources to ensure continuous site performance.
A Forrester ‘Total Economic Impact’ study commissioned by Microsoft in June 2016 revealed that significant cost savings and business benefits are achieved for customers who have moved their applications from on-premises or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model to Azure’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) deployment.
Here’s why you should host your Sitecore XP on PaaS
Sitecore XP offers substantial benefits to businesses if you host it on Azure PaaS. It will allow you to respond quickly and easily to meet the changing demands of your business operations in the marketplace. There are three key reasons why it is advisable to have Sitecore Azure deployment including agility, scalability, and cost-saving. Let’s see the advantages in more detail.
Agility
Sitecore on Azure PaaS is full of potential for your business. You will gain the power and speed to manage all kinds of digital marketing projects, especially with the ability to market in context to your customer interactions. With the advantage of agility, you will simply be able to deploy the Sitecore Experience Manager (XM), Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) in minutes using Azure Marketplace. You will have the ability to deliver more customized Sitecore environments through the Azure Toolkit for faster time-to-market. You are more likely to favor this decision if you have familiarity with .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, and other Microsoft technologies.
One of the primary benefits is your web services will be available any time around the world, 24/7 to support your immediate business needs when you are on PaaS.
Scalability
When you choose to host your Sitecore XP on Azure, you are also ensuring that your sites automatically scale to meet the unexpected demands. Often companies create ad-hoc solutions, but with Sitecore XP on Azure, you can relax and scale back your resources quietly and save costs. Your scaling options will depend on metrics like CPU usage or memory consumption, and in case you need to address complex scenarios you can use rules.
Here is another option; you can also choose to scale up your Application Service Plans. In typical case scaling out would simply mean to increase resources such as increasing number of CPU core and RAM. Additionally, you can also benefit from an increased number of potential instances of an Application Service Plan that you create.
Cost Saving
Deploy Sitecore to Azure and open the door for automatic scaling of PaaS consumption. You can relax and scale up when heavy user traffic is monitored on your web applications and scale down when the traffic decreases.
Hosting Sitecore XP on Azure can be a reliable, effective and cost-free decision as it does not require any big hardware investment upfront, and you can be worry-free about your hard disk failures, failover systems, and power outages. Furthermore, it will also reduce your software concerns on operating system updates, database updates, and software licenses – meaning you will require minimal active IT service support. You can rely on PaaS components that offer new capabilities for development team efficiencies; hence you may not require adding team members with specific skills.
Insight
Provide your enterprise the powerful combination of Sitecore Azure architecture and deliver impeccable business results of complete control over your data, integrated tools, and automation capabilities to engage with your customers.
Are you curious to know more about how you can achieve this business solution for your enterprise? Get in touch with our Sitecore and Microsoft experts for the right direction and share your concerns.
