BUILD A BETTER

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
WITH AEM ON
MICROSOFT AZURE

perficientdigital.com
Transforming to an experience-based business that’s
focused on selling experiences versus products and
services is no small feat. The vast amounts of data
available to both individuals and organizations have
raised expectations. Constantly connected customers
are demanding stellar, personal experiences when
interacting with brands they already know and trust.

Designing, building, and implementing top-notch

experiences requires a great deal of planning, strategy,
time, and, of course, the right platforms – for both
your marketing and hosting systems. But your ability
to drive customer engagement and loyalty is only as
strong as your digital experience platform and the
comprehensive set of cloud services on which it lives.
These platforms have evolved over time to keep pace
with customer expectations.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
In 2016, Adobe and Microsoft announced a partnership in which
they would pair Adobe marketing technologies with the Azure cloud
in order to help businesses transform customer engagement. Their
goal in this partnership is very much in line with what we, at Perficient
Digital, do for our customers:

“To help enterprise companies embrace digital transformation and

deliver compelling, personalized experiences through every phase of
their customer relationships.”

Adobe explained that it would make Microsoft Azure its preferred

cloud platform because of Azure’s reputation as a trusted, global
cloud platform, and Microsoft would make Adobe Marketing Cloud
its preferred marketing service. Businesses leveraging the two
technologies together would now be able to:

/ Harness their data for critical insights and predictions

/ Connect customer touchpoints across their business

/ Bolster relationships

/ Drive brand loyalty and growth

This big-picture focus on improving customer experience and loyalty

and driving business growth is critical, and we are working with
Adobe and Microsoft to help businesses achieve digital excellence.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
“Adobe on Azure will help enterprise companies
embrace digital transformation and deliver
compelling, personalized experiences through
every phase of their customer relationships.”
 Selecting the Right Digital
Experience Platform
Consumer expectations are on the rise. Your customers
anticipate a consistent and compelling experience with your
brand across channels and devices. The aim for companies
to become an experience-based business has become the
competitive high-ground, but your digital experience platform
should help you get there.

To improve customer experience and truly drive digital

transformation, most companies say that delivering an
“integrated, frictionless, and omni-channel customer
experience” is their top priority, according to a recent study by
Altimeter and eMarketer.

Many features that were once considered advanced in a

digital experience platform are now table stakes: separation
of content and presentation, what-you-see-is-what-you-
get (WYSIWYG) authoring with drag-and-drop tools, and
configurable approval processes. The leading businesses
today know that their platform must include those features but
also do much more to enable truly omnichannel customer
experience. These include providing semantic insight, APIs,
cloud support, and continuous delivery.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
 A Closer Look at Adobe Experience Manager
“Customers today expect a well-designed, personalized and
consistent experience every time they engage with a brand,”
said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe.
As a comprehensive content management solution, Adobe
Experience Manager (AEM) simplifies the creation, management,
and deployment of content, enabling your organization to deliver
experiences that are compelling, personal, useful, and everywhere.
AEM falls under the Adobe Marketing Cloud, which is part of the
larger Adobe Experience Cloud. Implementing AEM allows you to
accelerate innovation, source and manage assets at exponential
scale, and manage your content and experiences. Specific
innovations include:
/ Production-ready responsive components for websites with
broader support for cloud
/ Increase in scale and performance of digital asset management
/ Rich integration of brand and user-generated content (UGC)
/ Fluid experience delivery by composing and delivering content
beyond owned channels and touch points
PERFICIENT DIGITAL
Considerations for
Hosting in the Cloud
There are many factors to consider when hosting your data
in the cloud. You can host completely in the cloud or look
at hybrid options. You may want to use a public cloud, like
Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, or a private cloud within your
organization. In making these decisions, determine what’s most
important to you in terms of flexibility, scalability, and reliability.

According to Forrester, the cloud brings huge advantages to

digital experience platforms:

/ Ease of deployment

/ Performance on web and mobile devices

/ Access to data and computing power for personalization

/ Internet scale

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
 A Closer Look at Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure meets many of the requirements necessary
for successful cloud hosting. Azure is a set of cloud services
used to build, deploy, and manage programs from small
mobile applications to large, enterprise-scale solutions.

Azure’s lineup of services is constantly expanding. From core

datacenter extension capabilities such as compute, storage,
and networking to identity management capabilities like Azure
AD and its single-sign-on integration with popular enterprise
application platforms, including those outside the Microsoft
stack, there is an ever-broadening set of capabilities for to
evaluate as you look for competitive advantages and solutions
to difficult business challenges.

Deploying applications on Azure provides you with rich

scalability features, as well as best-in-class security and tight
controls on costs. In addition, hybrid options allow you to
easily offload workloads to the cloud or bring them back
on premises for any purpose. You can scale at a moment’s
notice for busy times or use temporary cloud resources for
development and test scenarios.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
3 Steps to Success
with AEM and
Microsoft Azure
Adobe Experience Manager’s ability to run on
Microsoft Azure brings together the best of both
worlds for digital experience platforms and cloud-
based hosting. After selecting AEM and Azure as your
platforms, a carefully planned strategy is essential to
success. We recommend three steps to success with
AEM and Microsoft Azure:

Plan > Deploy > Monitor

Let’s look at each in more detail.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
 Step 1: Plan a Foundation
for Success
This step builds the foundation for your AEM on Azure
deployment and provides vision, oversight, and long-term checks
and throughout your digital marketing lifecycle.

The pillars for a successful platform implementation include

digital strategy, governance, program management, and
change management. These pillars will support and guide the
entire project.

To ensure success, you’ll want to do the following:

ESTABLISH A CENTER OF EXCELLENCE (COE)

This cross-functional team oversees the execution of the entire
digital strategy and governance. The CoE addresses data and
operational challenges, breaks down departmental silos, fixes
disconnected processes, and establishes governance to maintain
the systems, shared data resources, and processes implemented.

DEFINE ROLES AND PROCESSES FOR GOVERNANCE

From a high-level perspective, digital governance establishes
standards, processes, and metrics, and is overseen by your CoE.
Governance is essential for creating and maintaining a customer
experience that provides relevant, meaningful content in the
right context.

Read More: AEM Pre-planning Checklist

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
Step 2: Deploy AEM on Azure
Undertaking an AEM implementation can be a daunting task for many
organizations. We recommend working with an implementation partner
like Perficient Digital to create an infrastructure roadmap that defines
and/or documents:
The physical and cloud architecture to identify network security zones,
AEM instances, dispatchers, firewalls and port maps, load balancers,
caching strategies, and integration connectivity.
A deployment plan for initially configuring software and infrastructure
that supports AEM on Azure and integrating other supporting platforms/
systems such as Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target (run books for
management and other documentation your IT team may require are
also created).
Integrated access and identity management with the Microsoft stack
to implement single sign-on for AEM, establish rules for users and
groups allowed to access the platform, and create permissions within
the platform.
A cloud security audit to evaluate the security of your company data
by measuring how well it conforms to a set of established criteria.
A disaster recovery plan that provides guidelines on how to recover
your AEM author and visitor-facing infrastructure.
Operations documentation to handle ongoing monitoring, patches,
upgrades, common tasks like tar compaction, log rotation, and anything
else that is required for day-to-day operations.
PERFICIENT DIGITAL
SIZING AND LICENSING

While most Adobe Experience Cloud products – including

Analytics, Target, and Audience Manager – are SaaS-only
offerings, AEM is available through:

On-premises licenses where you’re responsible

1 for Azure hosting, infrastructure, and administrative
support.

Adobe Managed Services (AMS), which includes

2 licensing, hosting, and administrative technical support
for production and nonproduction environments, and
gives you the option to host on either Amazon Web
Services or Azure.

Size the system appropriately, taking into account traffic,

content, and the number of concurrent authors that the
platform needs to support. Taking these steps ensures the
software and infrastructure will sufficiently meet your current
and future needs.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
 DEPLOYMENT

It is common for organizations to consolidate on a

single Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, and
Azure’s strong play in creating hybrid Windows cloud
environments makes it a logical choice for many IT
departments. Based on Hyper-V, Microsoft’s long-
proven native virtualization platform, the Azure
platform offerings have grown considerably over the last
few years.

AEM runs within a Java Virtual Machine, and

deployments on both RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
and its community counterpart, CentOS, are supported
operating systems. For organizations on Azure,
deploying RHEL or CentOS is quite commonplace.
Azure fully supports deploying these operating systems,
and the experts at Perficient have been doing it on
Hyper-V since its introduction in 2008.

Deploying AEM on a cloud platform is about far more

than just the underlying operating system. It is about
a feature-rich platform that scales, and automation to
reduce administrative overhead.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
Step 3: Monitor the Implementation
Once you implement the platform and launch your site, you or
your implementation partner will need to monitor and provide
training support on the solution and establish a digital
marketing lifecycle.

After deployment, certain tasks are monitored to maintain

system operation, performance, and integrity. Your team should
understand how your systems look and behave under normal
conditions to be able to recognize potential issues. Gaining
this picture is done by monitoring the system and collecting
information over a period of time.

Key areas to monitor and include in your maintenance planning

include:

/ General port and ping monitoring to observe basic AEM ports

/ Backup planning for recovering your instance(s)

/ Generic cloud services monitoring

/ Java Virtual Machine for thread count and memory

/ Log analysis to look for specific patterns that may indicate issues

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
 Conclusion
“After years of futile resistance, the digital experience
software industry has finally embraced the future in
the cloud,” according to Forrester.

Transforming to an experience business requires

careful planning and execution of the technology
that delivers a top-notch customer experience. And
of course, designing, building, and implementing
those top-notice experiences requires a great deal
of planning, strategy, time, and resources.

Your ability to drive customer engagement and

loyalty is only as strong as your digital experience
platform, and Perficient Digital, together with Adobe
and Microsoft, have the vision and technology to
get you there.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
Why Perficient Digital?
You need to be thoughtful when selecting a platform that aligns
to your business and marketing goals. However, avoid a do-it-
yourself approach when it comes to the implementation.

Choosing an implementation partner that’s the right fit is critical

to success. Consider those that offer a breadth and depth of
experience.

Perficient Digital brings unparalleled digital transformation

expertise to the table with capabilities that include:

/ Digital strategy development

/ Marketing and analytics

/ Branding, experience design, and software deployment

/ Systems integration and migrations

/ Digital design for web and mobile applications

/ Performance testing and optimization

/ Change management and governance

Whether your specific need is a re-platform or a platform

migration, it comes down to people and processes. These are
also crucial for success, and we want to involve your resources as
much as possible so that the transition is seamless.

PERFICIENT DIGITAL
 About Perficient Digital
We architect systems of customer delight. We move at the
speed-of-culture. We exist to delight our clients, by relentlessly
delighting their customers. We are what happens when more
than 350 of the most talented digital strategists, design pros,
brand shapers, digital marketers, data scientists and creative
coders all believe one thing to be true - exceptional customer
experiences always translate to positive ROI for our clients.

Perficient Digital blends the strategic imagination of an agency

with the deep technical acumen of Perficient’s established
consultancy to deliver exceptional customer experiences
for the world’s biggest brands.

PerficientDigital.com

@PRFTDigital

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