7 Reasons for an Enterprise to Consider Using a Modern CMS

The search for a new Content Management System in an enterprise can have many triggering events. Sometimes, this happens thanks to a well-prepared strategy. A strategy and a plan to replace the system with one that is better prepared for the future needs of the company. But, sometimes, the reasons are different ones, for example, if a website gets hacked and it turns out that the system in use cannot fully satisfy the security requirements, or it is just too expensive to constantly monitor, upgrade, patch and maintain. Let’s have a look at the top reasons why a company replaces its CMS.

As seen in many reports, vulnerabilities in CMSs are a constant factor. While some security issues are related to high complexity and the human factor on the server, it is worth mentioning that the server is not the sole component to monitor: Many threats originate from vulnerabilities introduced by add-on software like modules, plug-ins, themes, and extensions. They open backdoors to the system.

A typical on-premise CMS installation, whether commercial or open-source, comes with servers, databases, and additional modules such as search engines or plug-ins for editing. These servers are the main target of attacks. Unfortunately, the nature of these attacks is inherent to the systems running a traditional server-bound legacy CMS.

The solution to this problem is to make a cut and downsize the CMS architecture to minimize the number of server components and expose as little data as possible by means of well-secured, firewalled APIs. This can be achieved by moving most of the former server logic to the browser, and using serverless functions for the remaining components. And this is what Scrivito does with its Jamstack architecture.

If you have come to the point at which you are told by your project managers and the developers of your current CMS that “it can’t be done”, it’s time to start looking for an alternative. A Content Management System must not limit your business. Shouldn’t such a system be flexible enough to give you full freedom to implement whatever functionality you need and make it easy to integrate other platforms as well?

By “easy to integrate” we mean that your next CMS should be built on an excellent ecosystem that provides the opportunity for integrating with many systems. In the best-case scenario, it is headless/decoupled and built with React and the Jamstack architecture to provide a rich API to work with the tools you need.

When thinking about their own web projects or services offered digitally, many businesses don’t take scalability into account because it is invisible or unexpected. Scalability is often underestimated by companies not expecting their website to become popular. The inability to handle the workload and the traffic is painful in many ways.

The situation in which it becomes obvious that a service does not scale, is typically caused by a sudden spike in interest or activity. If, for example a viral campaign takes off, or a website is mentioned in the news, or there is some kind of a crisis, everyone suddenly wants to check the latest information on the website. This sudden spike in traffic can paralyze servers for hours, causing a significant loss in revenue, reputation, or even a legal risk in some cases.

Another aspect of scalability is connected to costs. You don’t want to have to maintain dozens of servers based on worst-case scenarios, only to be able to cope with traffic peaks. This overprovisioning wastes a lot of money spent not only for purchasing but also for maintaining those servers.

The answer to scalability is a cloud-native, full-stack architecture. CMS Scrivito is built specifically for the cloud and is powered by one of the top cloud-computing suppliers – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is the leader in cloud computing with solutions that take full advantage of the potential offered by this modern environment.

In order not to strain the patience of customers and employees, your website loading time should be less than 2 seconds. Statistics show a clear correlation between page load time and the percentage of users you lose with each second of extra load time. Users are extremely impatient nowadays, especially with mobile devices, so if you don’t make sure your websites load super-fast, you are leaving potential customers to the competition.

Today, “page load time” refers to the so-called First Contentful Paint, the time it takes for the browser to render the first piece of DOM content after a user navigates to your page. The First Contentful Paint has become the most important metric for Google’s SEO rankings next to the quality and relevance of the content.

Scrivito’s approach to the First Contentful Paint is to initially deliver the pages without their Javascript code, i.e. as static HTML files, to the browser – through a CDN, which is the fastest way to deliver web pages. After that, the Javascript code is restored to the pages to make them dynamic again, while the user can already browse through the site.

The maintenance of a legacy system is the major cost driver. Be it an open-source or a commercial CMS: The initial costs are often just a fraction of what needs to be invested during the life cycle of the CMS. The total cost of ownership (TCO) to keep the CMS up and running is the main burden over time.

The goal is to get rid of the IT part and focus on what’s essential for the enterprise’s digital existence: The business logic. Stop paying for backups, updates, patches, and security breaches!

Thanks to Scrivito’s native cloud approach, you can expect a considerable decrease in the total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as a significantly shorter time to market with projects. Scrivito is always available and up to date because it is provided as a web service. No data center operations are required.

Modern websites almost always need to be integrated with ERP or CRM systems in order to have the required information available and provide it to the customer in a user-friendly, orderly way. Enterprises usually require several systems to be connected. Integrations are critical because clients expect a seamless experience with all of the tools a company provides, and they want to get things done quickly and easily.

If you feel that an inappropriate portion of your website budget is consumed by integration work instead of the development of new functionality supporting your business, and integrating this new functionality takes months, it’s time to rethink the architecture and check if other approaches to achieving these goals exist. Most often, the total cost of integrations is much higher than replacing an existing CMS with a modern one.

Scrivito is designed to integrate and work with the tools you need. Essentially, every service with a RESTful API can be integrated with Scrivito. Many of our customers have built their own integrations, and we are providing dozens of tutorials explaining how to build yours. We’ve curated a list on Scrivito.com which showcases some of these integrations and tutorials for you.

Most legacy CMSs require constant maintenance to keep them secure and stable. They also require major updates now and then as new versions are released. Companies have become accustomed to postponing updating because this is a laborious process. The longer it is postponed, the larger the technical debt and the higher the risk becomes.

The answer to this is the SaaS architecture which reduces maintenance costs to zero. Scrivito makes customers’ lives easier by abandoning server-based technology and the management effort associated with it. Start focusing on building and growing your business instead of dealing with outages, upgrading servers, backing up data, and everything else caused by using legacy servers to host websites.

If you experience any of the above issues, you might want to start looking for an alternative to your current CMS in order to keep up with or overtake your competitors. If you have already started researching, we recommend taking a look at the top 10 qualities of a future-proof CMS.

In short, consider shortlisting Scrivito as your next CMS because this powerful enterprise-class Web CMS can act as the backbone of all your websites and web applications, enabling you to deliver great results quickly. Scrivito is provided as a software service (SaaS) and doesn’t require any IT maintenance. It’s flexible, extensible, and meets the highest security standards.

Scrivito scales with your needs. You can run multiple web projects, integrate other systems using APIs, and serve content to any channel or device from a single content hub via a fast global CDN. Our clients can build their web projects rapidly due to customizable widgets available in Scrivito’s intuitive WYSIWYG interface.