Automating deployments to increase speed and save money

This customer is a provider of cutting-edge payments and software solutions that works with companies of all sizes to simplify commerce and cultivate their vision of success. The global organisation works with the view that not all payments companies are created equal and enables them to offer seamless payment experiences in-person, online, on device, and over the phone across a wide range of markets. Over 3.5 million businesses around the world count on this provider.

Automating deployments to increase speed and save money

The organisation has a number of business units who use Sitecore as their digital experience platform, and many more in their onboarding pipeline.

While the existing businesses using Sitecore were happy with the feature-rich capability that the platform offered, the respective marketing teams were becoming increasingly frustrated with the length of time their IT teams needed to spend on deployments. Both businesses and their teams sought to find a solution that would allow IT to automate deployments so Marketing could get their messages in market faster. They also knew that automating deployments would not only help the marketing team with their speed-to-market, but save the business time and money – which could be better spent doing more marketing.

They tapped Dataweavers to help.

Latest Sitecore version on Azure PaaS for scalability, increased performance, and cost savings

To address scalability, cost savings and usability concerns, Dataweavers first recommended the business upgrade their platform to the latest Sitecore version, hosted on Microsoft Azure PaaS.

The latest Sitecore version upgrade would give the marketing teams flexibility and repeatability in leveraging core component libraries to build pages faster and get to market without relying so heavily on IT’s deployment schedule. Having the ability to access a global component library meant onboarding new business and building brand new sites would be faster for both Marketing and IT teams.

The move to Microsoft Azure PaaS would address site performance and security concerns, and allow new site onboarding to be completed in a fraction of the time.

The upgrade was completed in around 2 weeks, with Dataweavers leading the technical implementation.

It's tremendous, the speed increase and performance that we have seen already.

A representative of the Marketing Team. 

Seeing the benefits of moving legacy MarTech into the cloud

After the upgrade, the marketing team reports the performance of their sites are worlds away from their previous platform, with page load times a fraction of what they used to be.

While increasing performance of their sites, the move to Microsoft Azure PaaS has also addressed a number of security concerns. Manual security processes have been replaced by leveraging the latest cloud technology in Azure Security Centre. The technology automatically scans for vulnerabilities across all the assets inside their marketing applications, and assures the security team that Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is protected against data leaks and breaches. Having to rely on old, outdated legacy systems is no longer a concern in their new cloud-first environment.

Microsoft Azure for predictability

The predictability of operational costs is something that many businesses strive for and find hard to implement. Coupling the payment provider’s average website pageviews and website sessions during both peak and off-peak periods with Microsoft Azure, the business now has visibility and predictability of their Azure costs.

After just two months, the team is forecasting operational costs have been cut by 50% since the upgrade.

With a knowledge of both the baseline cost and the incremental cost per-million page views and per-million sessions, the team can now inform the business of future costs as new sites are launched.

Automating into the future

The platform is proudly 100% aligned with Sitecore best practices and supports the Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA), using Helix. This has resulted in a platform that can onboard any businesses into the group of companies quickly and easily.

The platform now provides an enjoyable developer experience and marketing teams now have access to all the features and benefits of Sitecore when they become available. Most importantly, the customer community have more user friendly, intuitive, and valuable web experiences that will continue to evolve into the future.