Cloud Connected

Security: Grade A

Sep 7

Cloud CMS comes in two flavors - on-premise and hosted. For our hosted customers, we host 100% of Cloud CMS and take care of all of the data backup, migrations, security, load balancing and… well, everything! It’s the whole kit and kaboodle. It’s all of the DevOps and stuff solved for you.

One of the fun aspects of this is keeping up with security requirements around SSL and HTTP Transport. Cloud CMS customers automatically gain the advantage of SSL for all of their communication with the Cloud CMS API, user interface and hosted applications. We run secure HTTPS endpoints for all of customer touchpoints and this guarantees our customers connect and communicate with Cloud CMS over a secure and safe channel. Their data is secure and cannot be tampered with over the wire.

To guarantee this, we keep our infrastructure up to date on all of the latest security recommendations with respect to SSL, including recommendations around cipher strength, certificate authorities, protocol support and key exchange algorithms. Every few months, some news hits the security realm about potential or demonstrated weaknesses in these algorithms and strategies. As weaknesses are understood, new workarounds are recommended and we implement those recommendations right away.

As such, our transport security received top marks:

We’re proud of the “A” that we’ve earned for our transport security configuration. This is excellent security. And something that we’re very glad to be able to guarantee our family of customers.

The best way to enable content authoring with your JS framework

Jun 22

Now that you’ve built that beautiful application in Angular, Aurelia, Ember, React - or the next big JavaScript framework - how do make your content authors happy?  Easy:  Think Headless.

Never let a CMS dictate your presentation tier options.  The field is too crowded and is changing too rapidly for pre-ordained “templates” to suffice.  Instead, crank out that prototype in your desired framework(s) and

• utilise REST calls to query content
  
• a simple mockup will do
• returning JSON for each node
  

Then go back and splice in actual CMS REST calls after-the-fact.  Or better yet, checkout their SDK.

Any API first, or headless, content management system worth its salt will dovetail nicely into such a process.  You get to spin up your MVP quickly, and look like a hero when authors can revise their items with ease.

Content as a Service

May 29

In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting a series of blogs that talk about the merits of Content as a Service and what it means in terms of driving a Content First approach to mobile and web application design at Cloud CMS. We’ll dive into how it enables our customers to get serious about the value of content within their business. We’ll also touch on industry trends and where we think it’s all heading.

Cloud Content Platform

Imagine all of your mobile and web applications connected to a fast and secure content backend that provides real-time publishing and instant insight into how your customers use your applications.

Imagine not having to build that. Instead, you’d sign up for it as a service in the same way that you’d sign up for SalesForce, GitHub or ZenDesk. It’s cost effective and it scales really nicely across all of your apps.

It’s content as a service. It provides a backend with all of the tools and applications needed so that your business users can create, manage and publish content to your mobile and web apps. It lets you get serious about your content, modeling it once so that you can create things once and publish them everywhere.

In the end, this makes it possible for a business of any size to manage 2, 3 or 100 sites worth of content… all from one place.

Today this is reality.

That’s what we’re up to at Cloud CMS.

At Cloud CMS, our goal is to provide all of the backend hard stuff that enterprise content management software has been doing for years… but at only 5% of the cost.

To us, that’s content as a service. It’s taking CMS – everything from web content management to document management, from records management to content analytics – and packaging it up behind a cloud service so that small businesses can use it to bring value to their customers.

We’re innovating in the cloud to do things that were never possible before. In doing so, we let small businesses get their hands on amazing tools to create content once and publish it across all of their applications.

Why the Cloud?

We’ve been at the cloud for a few years and so we know about the value it delivers. At its core, the cloud is a mechanism for reducing costs and giving your business better repeatability and reliability for its business infrastructure and processes.

You can think of this like a utility. Kind of like the electricity that flows into your home. You don’t really have to worry about how it works behind the scenes. The utility company might completely rearrange how they manufacture or distribute energy. As long as it works when you plug your lamp into the wall, it’s fairly transparent to you.

Software that is designed for the cloud is less expensive. It is elastic in nature which means that it can run on a single server sometimes and more servers at other times depending on your traffic needs. You only pay for what you use.

Cloud-based software, when properly implemented, can be priced much lower than traditional enterprise software. That’s why HelpScout, MailChimp, Cloud CMS and many others are able to offer the same features as older enterprise companies but at a fraction of the price.

In addition, software that is well designed for the cloud has the potential to span data centers all around the world. In fact, you can think of it running everywhere, all at once. Your mobile and web applications can simply request content, at any time, from anywhere and the infrastructure responds. 24/7. Anywhere in the world. And in any language.

The conclusion here is a simple one. Don’t spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for enterprise software. You’re being taken advantage of. Instead, go with modern software that was built for the cloud. Not just installed in the cloud. But instead, designed to provide you these advantages. You’ll not only get more features, but you’ll pay much, much less.

More to Come

That’s it for now. In our next blog entry, we’ll dive further into Content First and take a look at the impact to mobile devices and responsive design. We’ll also dive into cloud-connected applications and look at how content as a service is used to deliver amazing experiences that span multiple devices.

If you’d like to check out how all of this works in action, please visit Cloud CMS and sign up for a free trial. We’d love to know what you think.