13 considerations

for deploying an
experience platform
Evaluate cloud and on-premises
deployment options in context of
your business situation

DEMAND MORE AGILITY

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

Updated 04/17. 2017 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore and Own the Experience are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. 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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White paper // 13 considerations for deploying an experience platform
Introduction
Congratulations! Youve made a decision to either upgrade or
migrate to or invest in an entirely new customer experience
management platform. Youve 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, youll want to put some thought into deployment
approaches. After all, the advantages of deploying in the
cloud continue to grow, youve 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 youve done before and during deployment
must come together for a positive outcome, it makes the
most sense to start therewith 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, well discuss what youll 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
organizations unique needs.
Because different roles have different priorities, weve
categorized our considerations according to the audiences
who have a stake in your deployment decisions. While you
work backward from the customer experience, youll 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,
theyll 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 programsconsistently
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 audiences
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 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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White paper // 13 considerations for deploying an experience platform
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, youre
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 Internetfor
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
personalizedwhich generally provides a better
customer experienceCDNs 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 youre likely to encounter in the wild. Its
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 todays experience market, where first-to-market
wins, the cloud can be the difference between first
and second place. Advantage: Cloud.
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White paper // 13 considerations for deploying an experience platform

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
rapidlyand indeed, scale back just a quickly if
necessaryprovides 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 dont stay to plan.
Advantage: Cloud.
Key considerations for the IT pro
7. 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.

The cost equation

Generally, youll find that deploying a cloud solution
reduces upfront costs and capital expenditures overall.

On-premises Cloud computing

9% Software licenses 68% Subscription fee

Customization & Implementation,

implementation customization & training

Hardware

IT personnel

Maintenance

Training

Ongoing costs Ongoing costs

Apply fixes, patches, upgrade
Downtime
Performance tuning
Rewrite customizations
Rewrite integrations
Upgrade dependent
applications
Ongoing burden on IT Subscription fee
Maintain/upgrade hardware Training
Maintain/upgrade network Configuration
Maintain/upgrade security
Maintain/upgrade database

Source: BAASS

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White paper // 13 considerations for deploying an experience platform
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 involvedyou simply dont 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 customers 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. Thats
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 weve
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 disasterno 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 steps
Most 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
organizations circumstances must be considered individually.
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White paper // 13 considerations for deploying an experience platform

The Sitecore Experience Platform can be deployed in a

variety of environments, depending on your business
About Sitecore
and infrastructure needs, and has a flexible approach to Sitecore is the global leader in experience management
deployment, as follows: software that enables context marketing. The Sitecore
Experience Platform manages content, supplies contextual
Sitecore Cloud: You can deploy Sitecore XP, the intelligence, automates communications, and enables
Sitecore Web Experience Manager (XM), and personalized commerce, at scale. It empowers marketers to
Sitecore Commerce in a platform-as-a-service cloud deliver content in context of how customers have engaged
with Microsoft Azure by either hosting it yourself, with their brand, across every channel, in real timebefore,
having your certified Solution Partner host it for you, during, and after a sale. More than 4,900 customers
or having Sitecore manage hosting. Customers can including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, EasyJet,
combine this with our consumption-based pricing and LOraltrust Sitecore for context marketing to deliver
according to the volume of visits to your Sitecore- the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build
powered site. Ideal for customers who budget for loyalty, and drive revenue.
software as an annual expense or who have volatile
traffic patterns. Visit us at sitecore.net
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.
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