Sitecore CMS Azure Edition
Windows Azure provides organizations with on-demand compute, storage, networking and content delivery capabilities to host, scale and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. These currently serve 40 regions worldwide, with six global data centers, and a 99.9% uptime.
Sitecore’s CMS Azure Edition
Sitecore’s CMS Azure Edition leverages the considerable advantages of Azure for scalable, Enterprise class deployment. Azure allows Sitecore to extend its solution to the cloud, allowing customers and partners to easily and quickly scale websites to new geographies and respond to surges in demand.
Microsoft Azure provides a global deployment platform for Sitecore public facing web servers. Your Core and Master Sitecore servers are deployed locally at your facilities behind your firewall, but your public facing Sitecore web servers are hosted at Microsoft facilities. Microsoft Windows Azure’s compute, storage, networking, and management capabilities seamlessly and reliably links to your on-premise Sitecore application and servers.
The advantages of this hybrid approach is users can manage their main Sitecore editing and database servers securely on-premise and push website content to their front-end Sitecore based Windows Azure cloud servers in dispersed geographic locations.
Opportunities and Benefits
Streamline your time to market
Azure means you can deploy quickly in new markets. With no hardware infrastructure to plan, purchase, deploy and manage, your time horizon for implementation is much shorter. Ongoing maintenance, operations, upgrades and patches to the remote infrastructure are no longer your concern.
Scale globally, and get close to your customers
Getting closer to your customers is now more cost-effective than ever, with high performance response time giving that local feel. And your big swings in traffic go from being a challenge to a thing of the past. Sitecore deployed on Azure lets you open up new markets with a certainty of performance and reliability.
The Sitecore interface enables simple point and click to select any of the Microsoft Cloud data centers, allowing businesses to increase or decrease website capacity on the fly. The Cloud is finally maturing and presenting businesses with both its promise and true potential.
Deploy on Demand without hardware concerns
Your pressed IT team will appreciate the new found simplicity. Without hardware capital investment or infrastructure planning timetables, you can quickly deploy your public-facing Sitecore websites around the globe with Windows Azure. You’ll quickly gain geographic coverage, optimized response time by distributing your load and minimizing the round trip delays, and redundancy for reliability and disaster-preparedness. With multiple datacenters, diverse bandwidth, and 99.9% uptime, going global just got much easier. See Microsoft Azure for details.
Deployed with a single click, in as little as one hour
Bringing a new deployment of your website can take as little as one hour on Azure, a fraction of the time it would typically take to provision and deploy on owned infrastructure. Sitecore provides the executable deployment interface from within the Sitecore desktop User Interface, in a seamless experience. Sitecore:
- Converts the current web site into Azure format
- Converts the SQL database into Azure SQL format
- Transfers databases and packages to Azure
- Starts instances (servers)
- Completed typically in less than one hour.
Freedom to focus on your competitive advantages
Your organization has strategy, goals and competitive advantages that you are able to achieve with a global website deployment. Rather than being challenged around the clock with 7 x 24 hour time zone demands and remote, multi-country infrastructure operations, Azure’s Platform as a service can empower you. Azure’s leverage and scale becomes your means to gain business advantage without the operational drain.
See a Sitecore Azure deployment video