Optimize Your AEM Site With Run and Operate

Thousands of websites are powered by Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). With Adobe's recent push to move as many customers as they can to AEM as a Cloud Service, it's important to understand the role of a Run and Operate partner in your AEM implementation. While Cloud Manager is there to simplify the deployment process, it is not intended to provide the same level of support as a Run and Operate partner can.

This is where Rightpoint comes in. We fill in the gap between Adobe’s Cloud offering and your organization, acting as your advocate with Adobe customer support and ensuring your site is always running at its best.

Let’s compare hosting options for an AEM site, then highlight why Rightpoint’s AEM toolset is vital to optimizing your site performance.

AEM Hosting Options, Explained

There are three main ways to host an AEM environment: self-hosted, Adobe managed services, and AEM as a cloud service.

Self-hosted

The organization is completely responsible for the entire server setup, meaning the company must have a license key from Adobe. (Adobe is not responsible for the server.) Self-hosted sites may be on-premise, hosted on a private/public cloud, or hosted by a managed service provider such as Rightpoint.

Adobe Managed Services

For customers that have a license key, this option is exclusively on Adobe’s Cloud infrastructure. Organizations must rely on the Adobe Customer Success Engineer (CSE) for code deployments, or they can access the Cloud Manager for a CI/CD pipeline to manage it themselves.

AEM as a Cloud Service

This is Adobe’s latest and most comprehensive hosting solution, and any new AEM purchase will be directed this way. This option gives access to Cloud Manager for the CI/CD pipeline, an Adobe-managed CDN, autoscaling of the infrastructure, and access to the latest features and security updates.

Why You Need Run and Operate

While the latest AEM site hosting options have become more solid and secure, most organizations will need assistance with many aspects of self-hosting. Most on-premise customers don’t ever specialize in AEM and rely on a partner to manage the health and performance of their implementation. Rightpoint’s Run and Operate agreement can help such sites maintain a healthy state, creating automation to keep them up to date and tooling to enable their development team to work effectively.

Here are a few of the most valuable aspects of having Rightpoint as your AEM advocate:

• 24/7 site monitoring. We ensure someone is always available to address and fix an outage on your site — even if it’s not related to AEM.

• Ticket submission on your behalf. Our 24/7 team of AEM experts will open support tickets on your behalf and manage them through to resolution.

• Development acceleration. Adobe provides a limited number of non-production environments, but our Cord Tools offering allows developers to spin up an environment that is automatically managed, then have it shut down when it’s unused (so you’re not paying for unnecessary resources.) When traffic comes back, the Cord Tools solution will automatically spin it back up.

• Patch and update management. When Adobe releases service patches, they expect an implementation partner to help customers roll that out to their environments in a meaningful way. We can work with your team to define code quality gates and a release cadence to help ensure patches don’t break your implementation or negatively impact site uptime, responsiveness, or usability for either end-users or your content team.

Let Us Be Your AEM Advocate

For most organizations, your internal team won’t know AEM the way we do. Our team of DevOps engineers and system administrators have been working with AEM for over a decade and understand the intricacies of the AEM infrastructure.

We make it our business to ensure your site is always running smoothly. If there is a problem, we find a resolution. We’ll get the site up as fast as possible, and then discuss prevention tactics when the dust has settled.

As an AEM Sites DevOps specialized partner, we’re ready to help your organization regardless of which hosting option you choose. Contact our team today to learn more about how Run and Operate can help optimize your AEM site.