The proliferation of SaaS solutions into the massive and ever-growing cloud ecosystem has been godsend for digital marketers for more than 15 years. The days of expensive, IT intensive, on-premise solutions are largely a thing of the past. However, all the benefits of cloud solutions have not come without a significant negative side effect for data-centric marketers: silos of information stored by cloud solutions have made it almost impossible for marketers to have a unified view of their customers. For example, customer website activity may be stored with one vendor, email engagement with another, and on-line purchases with yet another. Those organizations that can overcome this handicap to have a unified view of their customers will gain a significant advantage over their competition. As always, technology continually evolves and improves, and there is a new breed of solutions gaining huge momentum across many industries. Please welcome the hybrid cloud.
So, what exactly is the hybrid cloud? Gartner defines it as a cloud computing service that is composed of some combination of private, public and community cloud services, from different service providers. Why is this a big deal? Hybrid cloud applications can enable secure and seamless integration of the private resources of an organization with vendor services in the cloud. Say goodbye to the silos.I can’t imagine an application that benefits more from the hybrid cloud than enterprise email marketing. On one hand, email marketing is an extremely data-intensive application devouring information from all over an organization for segmentation and personalized content. On the other hand, it also requires massive amounts of servers, bandwidth, and deliverability expertise that are best provided by an expert email service provider. The hybrid cloud promises email marketers secure, seamlessly integrated solutions that eliminate the limitations of SaaS (data duplication, data security, and ETL).
In the end, the hybrid cloud is just common sense. The all-or-nothing (on-premise and SaaS) solutions of the past simply can’t provide the performance, security, and convenience of the hybrid cloud. It is ushering in dramatic improvements over pure SaaS solutions across the board, and enterprise email marketers will be some of the biggest beneficiaries.