6 reasons your infrastructure will improve after a move to DXP

Here you will find 6 of the most valuable benefits an organization will see once they move to the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

1. Security

Optimizely’s DXP platform rests within Azure, a highly secure environment. On top of this secure environment, Optimizely provides our ISO 27001 certified solution, as well as separation of duties and a single tenant environment to ensure top tier security for our clients. Each environment is specifically set up for our clients ensuring they can meet the specific requirements for their business. 

We adhere to the following standards, regulations, and Best Practices:

• ISO 27001
• Privacy Shield
• GDPR
• Secure Development Lifecycle (ITIL, NIST, OWASP)
• Azure compliance (ISO, SOC II, NIST, PCI, Fed Ramp, …)

We provide the following security features:

• CDN & WAF
• DDoS mitigation
• Origin Shield
• HTTPS/TLS v 1.2 v 1.3
• Data-at-rest encryption
• Service Firewalls
• Azure data centers physical security

We also continually test our environments and encourage our clients to test so that makes sure they are as secure as possible:

• Optimizely regular testing – 3^rd party audited testing
• Customer WVS & Pen Test – Optimizely services
• Customer WVS & Pen Test – any services & tools of customer’s choice

Check out the article my colleague Mike, recently wrote 7 reasons your security team will thank you for choosing Optimizely DXP.

2. Performance

Optimizely’s DXP is designed to provide a top level performance. Again, we take advantage of the Azure platform and its global datacenters along with the Cloud Flare CDN that we provide as part of the DXP to ensure a global reach for our client’s websites. There are over 200+ edge nodes (45 in North America, 47 in Europe). These can provide a 30+ Tbps throughput.  Our clients typically see a 75%+ average cache hit rate. Optimizely’s DXP has built in automatic image optimization to ensure quick load time regardless of the amount of media being loaded. All this combined allows your website to load fast regardless where in the world someone is accessing it.

As in all things, the proof is in the pudding. Here are some stats from a client’s high traffic event that can better highlight the performance we can provide:

Recent customer seasonal scale event

• 10-hour event
• 40 million CDN hits
• ~540,000 Page Views and ~3.5 million API calls
• 500,000 unique site visitors
• Request Response stable throughout entire event ~50ms

3. Scalability

Performance is key to any web experience, but you don’t get consistent performance without scalability. Again, this is where Optimizely’s DXP can really shine.  Because we utilize Azure’s Web Apps, as well as Cloud Flare’s CDN, we can scale up quickly when a load is applied. As shown above, when a client’s website has a spike in traffic, we are able to provide the performance we do because the DXP can automatically add additional environments. What happens is, as load is applied, additional web app environments are auto deployed in real time until the environments can provide the appropriate level of performance and/or until the load is taken off. This can also be done ahead of time manually if the spike is expected.

4. High availability

Optimizely’s DXP can provide high availability in many ways. The first is the fact that (and yes, I know I say this a lot) we take advantage of the Azure Platform.  This provides us with paired datacenters. This allows Optimizely to back up the customer’s environment every 24 hours, the production content database every hour, and the content transactions logs every 5 minutes. We also back up our blob storage in near real time. All this to a secondary datacenter. For example, in the United States, if your primary datacenter was in Virginia, then your back up would be in California. This helps us ensure, that if there is a regional issue, your web experience will remain up and running.

Optimizely also provides Automatic Failover. This is similar to our standard back up of the environment, the main difference is that these backups are made to a warm site in the secondary datacenter. The primary datacenter is monitored and if it fails to provide a heartbeat 4 times in a row (they are sent every 10 seconds), web traffic will automatically be routed to the secondary datacenter until the primary can be restored.

Optimizely also takes advantage of slots within the Azure Platform. This allows clients to deploy out code but provides the ability to pull this back if an issue were to arise.

5. 24/7 monitoring

Another huge advantage of the Optimizely DXP is our monitoring. In a traditionally deployed environment, someone has to monitor the performance and uptime.  Generally speaking, this is a member of the IT department. If something happens to this environment (and from experience of being on call for systems, this always happens at night and on the weekend!), it is that person(s) responsibility to get the environment and site back up and running.  With the DXP, the monitoring is done by Optimizely employees 24/7/365. We have built an infrastructure that allows for us to monitor our clients with our follow the sun team of Optimizely and Azure experts.

Optimizely also provides updates to our clients on how their environments are performing, as well as any issues they may have seen or taken care of.  We also provide access to Azure App Insights so your team can stay informed, as well as rested.

6. Only pay for what you use

The final infrastructure benefit I see with the DXP in not something everyone thinks about, but in my opinion has a lot of value.  With the DXP you are only paying for what you use.   If you were to host your Optimizely website on premise, you need to build for your high traffic mark. Meaning, if on Black Friday you expect to have enough traffic to demand 8 production servers, then these 6 would need to run all year round. Each would need to be license, not only from an Optimizely perspective, but also any other software running, such as from Microsoft. If your website traffic on a non-Black Friday only requires 3 production servers, then you had to over build. With the DXP, your environment will auto-scale when your high traffic events take place, and scale back down once they are over.  You no longer have to be concerned with these high traffic events, but rather just your average annual page views.

There are many reasons why the DXP and its infrastructure can benefit your company. Above are some of the ones I have seen the most over my career at Optimizely. But overall, the Optimizely DXP provides a highly secure, highly available, highly scalable, highly performing environment that is monitored for you by us 24/7/365 and that you don’t over license. It takes the burden of creating, maintaining, and monitoring this infrastructure off your teams, so they can perform more tasks that are more engaging personally and ultimately more valuable to your business.