How to Ensure Your Technology is Secure, Stable and Scalable

Your business operates in the digital economy where success is predicated on your ability to compete in a high-velocity environment. Selecting, deploying and maintaining the right technology platforms will determine whether your business will thrive.
There are four primary areas you should focus on to maintain the efficacy of your technology foundation:
1. Security
Data is at the core of every business and your inability to protect it will be the end of your business. Outside of more regulated industries like finance and healthcare, security is unfortunately not one of the top priorities. For a company that operates on tight margins, investing in security is seen as non-revenue generating, serving merely as a risk-mitigating insurance policy.
Would you be able to convince your CEO to invest $100,000 to prevent the 10 percent likelihood of a cyberattack resulting in $1 million in damages? Or, is it easier to make the argument for a $100,000 investment which has a 75 percent chance of generating $150,000 in revenue? Flipped around, the former has a 90 percent chance of throwing $100,000 down the tubes, and the latter has a 25 percent chance.
The problem with applying an expected value analysis to security is that there are too many qualitative variables required in the assessment. What you should acknowledge on is that a security incident is a low-probability, but high-cost event. And it’s possible for that cost to be catastrophically high. Can you really quantify the cost of exposing all of your customer data?
2. Stability
If your technology doesn’t work when you need it most, what good is it? When a new customer tries to buy something from your website and it doesn’t work, it’s very likely that you’ve lost him forever. The most timely and unfortunate example is HealthCare.gov.
The digital centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act is supposed to permit Americans to sign up for health insurance online. The problem with the website is that, since it launched, it has intermittently not worked for users, displaying a multitude of cryptic errors or transferring invalid information to healthcare providers.
The lesson here is that the consumer has very little patience for a lousy online experience. In our digital economy, we have come to expect websites to work with the certainty of flipping a light switch or starting a car. When Gmail goes down for several minutes, there is a collective aneurysm on Twitter. A population that reacts like this is not going to tolerate substandard technology, so you better make sure your digital infrastructure works all the time.

3. Scalability
Your business objective should be growth and the digital infrastructure supporting your operations must be able to scale and accommodate the resulting increase in demand. If you have an infrastructure that is based on physical servers, you’ll need to be extremely accurate with your load estimates. In this situation, it’s better to overestimate the potential impact of increased business, than to underestimate. In the digital world, when you find yourself faced with the latter, you have no recourse in the midst of a traffic surge.
Imagine a three-lane highway that has three cars driving down it. Once you add a fourth vehicle to the mix, you start seeing congestion. At the end of a football game, ten thousand cars get added to the highway, and the result is a major traffic jam. Physical servers are fixed assets like highway lanes, which function perfectly under normal conditions, but are unable to expand and meet high demand.
4. Sustainability
Your ability to ensure security, stability and scalability at a single point in time is critical, but it’s more important to be able to sustain this over the long-term. The apropos and often overused analogy here would be that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, because you need to serve your customers today, tomorrow and in the future.
The digital business environment is fluid and dynamic, with regular traffic peaks and valleys. The nature of viral content is that it is unpredictable. Like a tsunami, it’s difficult to spot until it’s too late to respond -- when it’s about to break on your shores. Handling the scale of a massive traffic spike and sustaining that over a period of time is how you can take your company to the next level. That surge is likely exposing your brand to a massive new consumer base.
Digital infrastructure is the foundation on top of which many of you will build successful businesses. The potential for, and magnitude of your success is contingent upon the quality of this foundation. It has to be secure to protect your critical assets and data. It has to be stable and provide expected functionality for your customers. It has to be scalable to respond to the increasing demands of your success. And, it must sustain these traits over extended periods of time.
As an entrepreneur, your business should succeed or fail based on the merits of your ideas, not the technology used to support your operations. Your digital infrastructure should be secure, stable, scalable and sustainable, allowing you to focus on your core business.

Tracking Customers Beyond Google Analytics

At Novatex Solutions, a 10-person digital marketing firm based in Sugar Land, Texas, marketing manager Jason Ephraim was dealing with a common shortcoming of Google Analytics. While excellent at tracking broad trends over time for a website, the service doesn't quickly reveal the kind of individual visitor information that can make or break a site's ability to generate leads. And the amount of time Ephraim spent unpacking that data was eating into the company's margins.

"It's not that [Google Analytics] was lacking, it's that there was no way to form a complete picture, especially of an individual user," he says. He wanted real-time, at-a-glance data on those visitors that would quickly alert him to any site issues, and more important, allow him to tweak his marketing efforts to generate solid leads from the relatively small number of visitors to his clients' websites.

His goal: Find a tool that would complement Google Analytics' big-picture snapshot and free up his time so he could manage more campaigns--and clients--effectively.

The Fix
Ephraim signed on with London-based GoSquared, an analytics platform designed to demonstrate how people use a site, tracking key information like where individual visitors are from, what brought them to the site and how they view a page. "It very easily gets you up to speed in as little time as possible," says GoSquared co-founder and CEO James Gill. "We've managed to do that by deciding aggressively to cut features out of the product that we don't think are necessary."
Ephraim tested GoSquared on a medical
service provider's multistep lead-generation tool to see why it wasn't performing as well as expected. GoSquared's data indicated that the majority of visitors were getting stuck on certain steps and quitting the site. Ephraim quickly tweaked the tool, adding a step-by-step introduction page and changing its structure and flow.
The Results
The changes to the lead-generation tool resulted in a profit gain of roughly 20 percent for the client. Ephraim now uses GoSquared with all his clients' sites. Its efficiency has allowed him to nearly double his customer base and quadruple the number of advertising campaigns he can manage by himself. "With GoSquared, I always have a decent idea of what is going on and by extension know how well our advertising is working or if there is a problem," he says.
A Second Opinion
Douglas Bowman, marketing professor and co-director at Emory University's Marketing Analytics Center, calls Ephraim's combined solution a smart move. Bowman notes that GoSquared provides observational data that can be used to make quick adjustments, while Google Analytics is better suited for reviewing long-term data trends. "When trying to manage multiple sites that get modest traffic, you want, in some ways, a warning to tweak your attention," he says.
However, Bowman cautions that Ephraim will eventually need to figure out when he's reached capacity. "When does he make the transition from trying to monitor multiple sites at once to deciding, ‘Let's get a dedicated person for a single site'?"

Tracking Customers Beyond Google Analytics

At Novatex Solutions, a 10-person digital marketing firm based in Sugar Land, Texas, marketing manager Jason Ephraim was dealing with a common shortcoming of Google Analytics. While excellent at tracking broad trends over time for a website, the service doesn't quickly reveal the kind of individual visitor information that can make or break a site's ability to generate leads. And the amount of time Ephraim spent unpacking that data was eating into the company's margins.

"It's not that [Google Analytics] was lacking, it's that there was no way to form a complete picture, especially of an individual user," he says. He wanted real-time, at-a-glance data on those visitors that would quickly alert him to any site issues, and more important, allow him to tweak his marketing efforts to generate solid leads from the relatively small number of visitors to his clients' websites.

His goal: Find a tool that would complement Google Analytics' big-picture snapshot and free up his time so he could manage more campaigns--and clients--effectively.

The Fix
Ephraim signed on with London-based GoSquared, an analytics platform designed to demonstrate how people use a site, tracking key information like where individual visitors are from, what brought them to the site and how they view a page. "It very easily gets you up to speed in as little time as possible," says GoSquared co-founder and CEO James Gill. "We've managed to do that by deciding aggressively to cut features out of the product that we don't think are necessary."

Ephraim tested GoSquared on a medical service provider's multistep lead-generation tool to see why it wasn't performing as well as expected. GoSquared's data indicated that the majority of visitors were getting stuck on certain steps and quitting the site. Ephraim quickly tweaked the tool, adding a step-by-step introduction page and changing its structure and flow.

The Results
The changes to the lead-generation tool resulted in a profit gain of roughly 20 percent for the client. Ephraim now uses GoSquared with all his clients' sites. Its efficiency has allowed him to nearly double his customer base and quadruple the number of advertising campaigns he can manage by himself. "With GoSquared, I always have a decent idea of what is going on and by extension know how well our advertising is working or if there is a problem," he says.

A Second Opinion
Douglas Bowman, marketing professor and co-director at Emory University's Marketing Analytics Center, calls Ephraim's combined solution a smart move. Bowman notes that GoSquared provides observational data that can be used to make quick adjustments, while Google Analytics is better suited for reviewing long-term data trends. "When trying to manage multiple sites that get modest traffic, you want, in some ways, a warning to tweak your attention," he says.

However, Bowman cautions that Ephraim will eventually need to figure out when he's reached capacity. "When does he make the transition from trying to monitor multiple sites at once to deciding, ‘Let's get a dedicated person for a single site'?"