Be the hare, not the tortoise
In the case of the cloud, slow and steady does not win the race. High-volume publishers rely on inbound traffic to drive business forward and even a few seconds of website slow down or an unresponsive page can have a massive impact on revenue. Forty percent of people abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions and your ability to rank organically, which means more money must be spent on SEM to make up for the difference.
Leveraging on-premise servers might work for lower volume publishers because variability in server load is minimal and the overhead of maintaining a small number of servers is relatively low. But for higher volume publishers, even moderate volume changes can spell disaster if your infrastructure isn’t up to snuff. Slowdowns can impact businesses negatively, and for many high-volume publishers the potential revenue loss and additional cost of purchasing and managing a large volume of physical servers just isn’t worth the money or risk.
But slow doesn’t just mean site speed. It also means time to market, which, if delayed, can cost your team valuable time and money. Cloud-hosted services have changed the game in terms of development and launch times. For example:
- What used to take hours of server setup and configuration now takes seconds, and this holds true for cloud CMS platforms as well.
- The extensibility of resource acquisition and allocation the cloud provides has empowered developers to build and launch large sites quicker than ever.
- CMS systems with managed hosting have made things even easier by helping you focus on the front-end customer experience while they manage the backend.
Low-code cloud CMS is the future
Low-code cloud CMS platforms are proven to be more cost-effective, reduce dependence on IT teams, and offer a much faster time-to-market by streamlining development and implementation. According to Salesforce, more than 60% of IT leaders, “believe that low-code development will positively impact the software development cycle, enabling business users to deploy applications more quickly.”
Legacy CMS systems in comparison, have larger, more complicated code bases with larger footprints, that are historically harder to manage. And although they may be cloud capable, they come with much higher hosting costs– managed or otherwise. Ultimately, they just weren’t built for the cloud.
So what does all this mean for your company? It means that using a low-code CMS is the key not just to staying current, but to maintaining your future-focused status.
Security is serious business
Outdated security is no joke, and the negative effects of hackers are growing. A recent article by IDG predicts cyber crime damage costs may hit $6 trillion annually within the next few years. Your old on-premise system may seem like it’s safe, but with cyber crime getting more advanced, protecting your legacy infrastructure will become more difficult and expensive.
Having outdated security may even mean your website might be at risk of failing international privacy standards, made even more important by the new GDPR regulations. As a result, your international business(es) may suffer—and your site may be limited in certain countries.
Fortunately, using a cloud CMS provider with managed hosting services can mitigate both security risks and the work your IT team needs to do to ensure your website is secure.
Future proof your business
Modern cloud CMS systems allow you to support any traffic demands by elastically scaling at peak and trough demand times, ensuring your website is up, fast, and efficient at all times. This gives you the most flexibility and performance with the added advantage of being fiscally efficient.
If you're a high-volume publisher, it's time to consider the benefits of a modern, cloud-first CMS like Brightspot. As a light-weight, low-code, API-first platform, Brightspot streamlines the development process from content creation to publishing and distribution—driving business and keeping you focused on what matters: your content and customer experience. It also enables other developer-friendly options such as the ability to use Brightspot as a headless CMS or decoupled CMS for enhanced developer control.
To bolster our cloud-forward thinking, Brightspot recently became certified as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Technology Partner. Based on our customer preferences, we can host with AWS, or other providers, as needed. Most of our clients use AWS for cloud hosting, as it affords them many benefits including:
- High availability using AWS's storage, content delivery network (CDN), and traffic-sensitive scaling capabilities.
- Low latency delivery using a CDN to serve content, whether it's text or multi-media, closer to the consumer.
- Rapid infrastructure change using Beam and the AWS software development kit (SDK) to spin up new environments and expand or modify existing ones on the fly.
- Safe installation of Brightspot updates with no downtime using a blue/green deployment model.