How a digital experience cloud can lift your business

In the history of CMS, traditional content management systems evolved into broader digital experience platforms, and are now evolving into digital experience clouds. Being more than just another new buzzword, digital clouds fundamentally alter the way organizations can do business—and stragglers will not survive.

A healthy business is closely aligned with a great customer journey—and in order to lift the former, you will need to improve the latter. A digital experience cloud can provide the necessary boost to make this goal reality.

Here are some arguments in favor of the adoption of a digital experience cloud.

Focus on your customer journey and solutions

A digital experience cloud (DXC) offers the same features as a digital experience platform (DXP), but with one crucial difference: Demanding tasks like operations, scaling, and cloud deployment are managed by the vendor instead of in-house or by a third party. This means the platform itself is readily available, enabling you to focus solely on building solutions and improving your organization’s digital customer journey and personalized experiences.

Being less dependent on internal resources to begin a project will liberate time and resources, so you can develop your content and services—resulting in potentially more value to your customers. This means increased revenue and saved costs.

In a time when even the smallest delays can cause decline in conversion rate and page view throughout the customer journey, having a fast and powerful cloud in the core will certainly be a business advantage.

Fewer moving parts

Managing cloud infrastructure and operations  in-house allows for more complexity and more moving parts—and consequently more risk.

But no organization can excel in all areas. Managing operations yourself means you need to know every detail, which is both time-consuming and costly. This is why the division of labour economy is so successful. Outsourcing to cloud professionals keeps the parts of your concern to a minimum, while the vendor simultaneously takes advantage of its economies of scale.

Unily also stresses the importance of business integration with a unified digital experience cloud, listing advantages like improved communication between colleagues, partners, and customers, increased productivity by gathering technology and data in one place, and an overall improvement due to one seamless, friction-free experience.

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Pay as you go

Tight budgets can put a lock on even the most promising of projects, and businesses regularly seek predictability in prices, operations, and future roadmaps. With a digital experience cloud you have no need for a large upfront investment. There will be less unknown factors from the start, and you pay as you go for what you actually need and use.

However, make sure that you research potential vendors thoroughly, as they might offer differing pricing models. The most predictable models offer pricing based on capacity, while others may lean on more traditional models with upfront payment and more rigid subscription solutions. Just make sure you know in advance.

If the pricing model is right, a digital experience cloud can essentially be suited to grow alongside your business—you can start small and scale as required. This does not only involve e.g. traffic spikes to your digital experiences, but also storage scaling, backups, and the addition or removal of features as time goes by.

You pay only for what you need, but are ready to grow. You no longer need to carefully plan your IT infrastructure all at once, but can adapt to new opportunities as they arise.

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Security

Security is a fundamental issue not to be treated lightly by any serious organization. The responsibility for digital experience security should therefore be shared with the cloud vendor, instead of being wholly outsourced. While the vendor has a vital interest in managing security across all its customer base, the vendor naturally cannot claim responsibility for all custom solutions you eventually build on top of the platform.

However, costly and time-consuming security and penetration tests will primarily be handled by the vendor, freeing your teams to focus on your core business. For instance, the vendor can offer a host of security features not easily handled in-house—like layered firewalls, security event monitoring, single sign-on, two-factor authentication support, automated platform monitoring, virtual private cloud, and GDPR-compliance, as well as fast and efficient vendor troubleshooting and configuration changes.

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The bottom line of investing in a digital experience cloud is to deliver value to your customer faster, potentially increasing the revenue for your business.

First published 15 January 2020, updated 6 October 2021.