If you are thinking of moving to the Cloud, you have probably heard a lot of technological jargon used to explain the Cloud and how it can benefit not only your marketing efforts, but your business as a whole. Scaling, redundancy, latency – thousands of hosting providers use the same verbiage to describe their managed hosting and why it’s “enterprise grade” and “best in class.” With so many products and so many providers, how do you know what you’re really getting? In fact, with all of the choices out there, wouldn’t it be nice if you knew enough about one product so that you could ask for it by name?
Rarely do we have CIOs come to us and ask for a product by name; however, when we do, it is usually a request for Microsoft Azure Managed Hosting. Since that’s our specialty, we are more than happy to oblige.
Why do so many of our customers request Azure Managed Hosting? Well for starters, for the second consecutive year Microsoft is the only vendor positioned as leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Application Platform as a Service, and Cloud Storage Services. This reaffirms the public’s confidence in Microsoft products and its commitment to delivering industry-leading infrastructure services, platform services, and hybrid solutions.
Microsoft has data centers in 22 regions and 140 countries around the world, more locations than AWS and Google combined. The platform manages more than a million servers and holds 54% of the Cloud market. Microsoft Azure has more than 90,000 new Azure customer subscriptions every month, and over 57% of Fortune 500 companies are using Azure.
Azure Managed Hosting: It’s What We Do
There are a number of reasons why we love Azure. Our developers love the fact that Azure is supported by a robust and proven framework and tool set: as part of the Microsoft family, its ease of use is an enterprise developer’s dream because of its familiarity and year’s of proven performance across the most demanding enterprise workloads. Azure also has templates and tools to build and manage enterprise, mobile, and Web apps faster. But enough about us. Here’s what really counts – here’s what our customers love about Azure Managed Hosting.
Marketing Teams That Require Resources
Azure Managed Hosting is popular with any company that engages in marketing efforts. You may be surprised to read that a marketing team is considered a key user that benefits from Azure Managed Hosting, but after I explain you’ll see why.
We see scenarios of all types: companies with small marketing departments that lack the technical knowledge needed to see their marketing efforts come to fruition, as well as larger companies whose IT departments may simply lack the resources to support the marketing team’s efforts. Regardless of whether the business is large, small, or a one-man show – marketers love Azure because, well simply, it makes their lives easier.
Finding a Common Ground between Marketing and IT
If you’ve ever had the task of trying to find a common ground between the marketing department and IT, be prepared to be amazed. If your company regularly launches aggressive marketing campaigns that have IT scrambling to come up with the resources and infrastructure to support the campaign, you’ll be happy to know that Azure makes it possible to execute a campaign quickly and easily. Digital marketing initiatives that need to be rolled out quickly with full testing, preparation, planning, and support can be done immediately – a crucial component of remaining competitive within your industry.
Create New Web Applications for Each Product Launch
Now the marketing team can demand new web applications for each product launch or marketing campaign, and this can be done in minutes. You can choose from Azure’s already existing templates, or you can choose to run existing web assets if you frequently create digital marketing campaigns. You can even please the pickiest marketing executive by running a/b tests prior to launch to ensure that your campaign assets are attracting qualified leads, and to make any necessary changes to an application prior to launch. Azure allows you to look at real working versions of a campaign application at the early stages and make any changes before it goes live. Of course, the web apps can integrate with social media, so promoting your campaign is also made easier.
Monitor and Analyze Your Web App’s Performance
Marketing professionals love to monitor and analyze the progress of a campaign. Azure makes it possible to monitor an app’s performance to gain insight into its users, improve user experience, and ensure that the campaign is a success. Azure’s Application Insight provides a 360-degree view of an app’s availability, performance, and usage.
Azure also offers tools to make your next digital marketing campaign a success, such as:
- Azure Media Services – Handle high quality media experiences for a global audience
- SendGrid Service in Azure Marketplace – A Cloud-based email service
- Mobile Services – Establish presence on Windows, iOS, and Android devices
- Notification Hub – Send push notification to millions of devices
Leave the Headaches to a Managed Azure Expert
The number one reason why marketers love Microsoft Azure Managed Hosting is simply because it is managed by us! That means that you can leave all of the heavy lifting to us. When you are concerned with launching a marketing program, the last thing you want to be thinking about is your hosting and network infrastructure and if it can sustain your marketing efforts. You will want to find a partner with extensive experience with Azure who also understands what is involved in a marketing campaign. Marketing is what you do best, so focus on that and leave the rest to us. We help companies with their digital marketing efforts with exceptional service, support, and commitment.
- We’ll take into consideration your performance, compliance, and security needs, then design a package that’s just right for your marketing efforts.
- We perform application testing to ensure that your infrastructure is ready for the increase in traffic that results from a successful marketing campaign.
- We’ll do load and stress testing upfront to ensure that your network will perform under any conditions.
- We take extra measures to protect your and your customers’ data by performing server anti-virus maintenance, firewall maintenance, data encryption, maintenance of a secure FTP server, implementation and management of an emergency operation mode web application firewall, and performing CDN management and maintenance.
- We proactively monitor and maintain every aspect of your infrastructure, including both network and application issues.
- We’ll work directly with marketing professionals – no service tickets necessary.
- We’ll provide regular reports on who is using your site, which portions of your site are most engaging to your audience, and other feedback that’s vital in measuring how effectively your campaign is reaching your target audience.
Remember, it’s more than just selecting a hosting company, it’s about finding a partner you can rely on to provide Microsoft Azure Managed Hosting expertise. At PointClick, we understand how important it is to provide you with a level of expertise to make your marketing campaign a success. We don’t think of you as a customer – we think of you as our partner in business. We’ll make sure your network runs smoothly so you can focus on what really counts – marketing. For more information about the specialized services we provide to our clients, contact us today.
