Month: September 2020

Understanding the concept of a hybrid cloud is easier if you first understand the key differences between public and private cloud services.

A public cloud is a virtual network of servers and services, exposed as compute resources, storage, and service APIs, which can be invoked by applications running within a publicly accessible virtual server environment. Azure and AWS are popular examples.  All the servers in the public cloud exist in the same network environment, managed by the cloud provider, and applications access services using access control systems and encrypted network protocols.  This simple and flexible model works  for many typical cloud applications scenarios.

But if an organization wants to take the step to add additional security and to manage your own cloud network, with control just like in the on-premises datacenter, you are looking at a private cloud.  A private cloud consists of a secured virtual server environment with fine levels of access control over the network architecture.   A private cloud could be as simple as a single server running a few virtual compute resources, or as a virtual private cloud deployed through a public cloud provider. Private clouds on premises must implement their own virtualization software, known as a hypervisor, like VMware, which manage the virtual compute resources.

A hybrid cloud, as you might be figuring out by now, is when a public cloud and private cloud is networked together into a single, virtual environment connected via WAN.  For many large, mature IT organizations, running a hybrid cloud architecture is necessary due to the sheer amount of existing infrastructure and investment already in place.  

Additionally, a public cloud-compatible management layer can allow administrators to manage compute and storage resources across both public and private clouds seamlessly, giving them greater flexibility to manage security and costs.  OpenStack is a popular example of this orchestration software layer.

It’s important to note that hybrid clouds can have a higher level of technical complexity than a public cloud, and often require significant expertise, particularly due to the complexity of implementing private clouds.  

Why Hybrid Cloud

There are number of reasons to move to a hybrid cloud.  As we’ve seen above, sometimes it’s often the only reasonable solution in the near term, as the cost, time and complexity of a full replatforming may be too much for many organizations.  But there are other, often strategic reasons to use a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Hybrid clouds are often useful when creating a seamless extension of on-premises datacenter. This facilitates the migration of applications to the cloud over time, while retaining the mature security infrastructure and processes often developed over many years.  Organizations who take this approach often are selectively choosing whether to move applications to cloud or replace them with cloud-native solutions over a long period of time.

Another big reason reason is cost.  On-premises computing power is often significantly cheaper than cloud computing resources, particularly for intensive uses like graphics rendering, real-time transactions, and intensive data and analytics.  Expensive tasks can be handled in the datacenter with cheap, powerful, fast servers and commodity storage with high scale business applications can be handled in the cloud.  This is often attractive if an organization has already made an investment in high performance computing resources.

As cloud and SAAS-based products have become the norm, the tech industry has shifted from typical enterprise-style marketing to one that much more resembles consumer marketing. When the project is digital and the customer is using digital as the primary sales channel, acquiring new customers via digital is a logical and necessary strategy. Since many marketing programs in this sector drive customers to convert via a free trial or other digital experience, enabling not only a high-value conversion but the ability to collect rich in-app usage data from known customers. Compared to manufacturing or services, quantifying the return on a marketing investment in a SAAS app is often much simpler to produce, often in nearly real time.

For most B2B SAAS companies, customer aquisition via the internet is the primary focus, with brand becoming increasingly important as the space has grown crowded with so many similar products. Search and Social media marketing have emerged as the dominant marketing tactics in this space, fueling the massive and rapid growth of Google and Facebook who have captured xx% of the global share of marketing spends.

With most companies seeing 50%+ of their web traffic from Google organic search engine results, SEO has become a fixture in the toolkit for B2B SAAS marketers. Optimizing landing pages, developing product and feature content, blogging and social media presence all help to drive search traffic to leadgen forms and free trial signups.

Organic traffic is perceived as cost-effective, often even seen as free, although many marketers spend budget on specialists and agency to optimize organic search and produce high quality content on their behalf. This channel also has the advantage of mich higher [cite] conversion rates than ad channels.

The primary challenge of organic search marketing is the more limited ability the marketer has to affect the desired outcome. As search engines have matured and their technology has become more sophisticated, search results often favor well-known brands. Relying on search engine tricks that worked in the past, such as keyword stuffing or content duplication, now can result in penalties which could cause a major loss of traffic. Additionally, there is a latency to SEO results, often measured in months, as content is developed, published, shared and linked back to. With recent changes to Google’s reporting, marketers can no longer see keyword-level traffic to their site.

Typical organic search metrics include:
* keyword searches
* result impressions
* inbound sessions from search marketing

More and more B2B SAAS marketers are investing in Google’s AdWords and other pay-per-click search engine advertising methods. These products not only allow marketers to guarantee a top-of-page placement, they ensure that the company is capturing searches for their brand and key non-brand searches. These ads also have the added benefit of providing a better user experience for customers looking to narrow down a large set of results into just a few vendors. PPC ads allow much more control and flexibility to marketers. They offer the ability to do copy variations, can be mapped to A/B tests, and offer tremendous control for marketers willing to pay a premium for high quality traffic. While a typical B2B SAAS company may only receive 30% of traffic from PPC ads, this spend is often the largest component of an advertising budget and is often the biggest individual source of leads.

Typical paid search metrics include:
* keyword searchs
* result impressions
* average cost-per-click
* cost-per-conversion or cost-per-lead

Social advertising is also emerging as another popular tactic, in the B2B space most attention goes to LinkedIn, which allows for highly targeted advertising to specific roles, industries and titles . Native advertising, content boosting and pay-per-app-install models are all popular and have moved from experimental to core tactic for many B2B SAAS marketers. Particularly attractive to mobile SAAS apps are pay-per-app install ads, which allow an easy user experience directly from the ad, reducing the friction that many customers have when locating software in crowded app marketplaces. Even if a B2B SAAS businesses isn’t truly mobile-first, customers increasingly expect a seamless experience: they want to touch and feel the product right away, rather than engage in a complex enterprise sales process right off the bat.

Most B2B digital marketing programs include at least some display advertising, typically in the form of banner remarketing and display retargeting. These ads are displayed after a customer has visited the web site, and are cost-effective at both brand development and assisting conversions. Retargeting pools make excellent sources for marketing off of your web site. Compared to typical programmatic display or traditional ad banners, these are far more effective in keeping interested customers engaged, and are often a low cost way to remind your visitors to convert.

Measuring customer experience is another key element to ensuring your digital program is succeeding. A/B Testing is the most common and powerful way to capture customer engagement. Landing pages, tailored to ad or offer copy, is the typical way to drive ad impressions into prospects. Having a strong offer is important, and free trials, guided demos and webinars are a great way to encourage prospects to share their personal information

Mobile has also increased the depth and number of possible measures as well. Since most analytics tools allow for in-app data collection, it’s possible to get very rich customer experience analytics from a mobile application. Compared to a web app, mobile app events are much easier to define and track, and allow marketers to capture key user engagement metrics.

Finally, Email nurturing remains the cornerstone of any B2B marketing program. With sophisticated automation systems available from a wide variety of vendors, the ability to produce and send targeted emails has never been easier. Targeting the message based on user profiles, activity or behavior leads to higher conversion rates, and many B2B prospects are much more willing to engage via email in the intitial stages of their buying process than