Adobe has moved to the cloud with its enterprise content management system (CMS), Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). With CMS' in the cloud looking to become the standard in years to come, are you ready to make the switch and why is now the time to do it?

In our first blog of this short series, we talked about who might want to migrate to the cloud service and the broad benefits that you would get from the move. In our second blog, we explored some of the technical implications that you will need to think about.  Of course, if you are considering AEM as a new deployment then you are mostly likely thinking about cloud anyway. With Adobe’s strategy now firmly aimed at developing AEM as a cloud service first and foremost, any new deployments are likely to follow that strategic direction.

But for those older deployments, what sort of business benefits can you expect?

Reduce reduction in operating costs

Moving to the cloud service also moves the day-to-day management of the platform to Adobe. Adobe will take care of availability, auto-scaling and security so your teams don’t have to. This moves the management of the current cloud environment away from your IT team or hosting partner, reducing operating costs and any potential retained resources. AEM then becomes a solution your digital and marketing teams can really push to drive additional revenue to your business without having to worry about internal conflicts. You also have the benefit of Market Leading Service Levels, with round the clock support and speedy resolution to any incidents that may occur.

Commercial strategy: upgrade or switch to cloud

During typical AEM product upgrades the time spent on upgrade configuration, transition and testing comes from operations budgets. With the migration to a cloud service this transformation of your business operating approach can typically be capitalized by the finance team. This provides the benefit of the in-year operational budget saving from a migration cost, the lower ongoing operating cost and a reduction in any future product upgrade costs.

Reduce in risk for costly upgrades in future

Historically, AEM deployments have had to be maintained by internal IT teams or a partner so updates have typically been sporadic. In many cases, AEM has also been heavily customized and integrated to other parts of the organization using various different methods and standards. This has led to some AEM deployments being very costly to keep updated due to the level of customization that needs to be replicated in a newer version.

Because the new cloud service is fully operated by Adobe, you will benefit from automatic updates to the software. That means it’s always up to date with the latest security patches, bug fixes, and innovations. And because any customization is performed within the Adobe cloud environment, everything can be managed, conflicts resolved, and upgrades performed with little effort.

Reduce the risk of operational issues, which also reduces the risk of lost sales

As we spoke about above, with AEM as a cloud service, Adobe manage the scalability of the platform. So those spikes that you will no doubt encounter on your websites during peak periods are automatically scaled to meet demand. This significantly reduces the risk of your websites or mobile apps going down during busy periods, and helps to mitigate the risk of any lost revenue due to those outages:

• Save on future operating and product upgrade costs
• Capitalize on upgrade costs to make savings on in-year operating costs
• Reduce operational risks 
• Benefit from increased business ROI from improved product functionality

Take the next step

It’s important to inform your AEM cloud migration plan with data and insights specific to your business landscape and CX ambitions. Merkle now offers a complementary AEM to Cloud Migration ROI Assessment to companies considering this move – you can begin this process or learn more about it here.

Beyond AEM, Merkle is an expert across the full Adobe universe and we’d love to help you. Get in touch to learn about the many ways we help customer drive CX transformation with Adobe.