Dan MoyleMarketers who don’t understand CDNs, SSL certificates or proxy servers make an IT manager’s life difficult. For a business whose IT department “owns” the website, working with marketing can be a headache.
When marketing wants to bring in a new content management system and launch a shiny new website, IT managers get twitchy.
Instead of an adversarial relationship, marketing and IT can actually work together and create an amazing experience for prospects and customers. And it doesn’t have to take a miracle.
Historically the IT Department handled websites in a vital role because of its assistance with the development and technical (as distinct from creative and content) maintenance of the website; it’s especially true if the site resides on the servers of the organization.
Because of this, some IT and Marketing Departments are at odds with which tools to use and who has “control.”
What we’re finding at Impulse Creative is that a lot of that historical conflict is now irrelevant with HubSpot’s latest CMS evolution. In fact, the CMS Hub is allowing IT to off-load much of the workload they’re not in love with, and empowering the marketing department to do what they do well.
Some IT managers even love like tolerate embrace the HubSpot CMS Hub (Professional and Enterprise).
Monitoring Website Health and Versions
First, we know that the speed, security and reliability of a website is of the utmost importance to the IT professional.
With CMS Hub, you can monitor the health of your website and take action to ensure it’s constantly providing site visitors with the best experience possible. And you can do it without marketing feeling like you’re taking over. It’s much more of a partnership where both departments get what they want.
Here’s a great example of how IT can manage changes and monitor versions without needing to be the one making them.
Your business likely has at least a handful of people making changes to your website. It’s easy for you to keep tabs of who’s changing what, and when updates to your site goes live in the beginning.
But as you grow and add more and more people to your teams, keeping track of who has publishing access and monitoring website updates as they happen becomes nearly impossible.
In CMS Hub Enterprise, you can see exactly what changes are happening across your entire site — you never have to track down how a change was made, who made that change, or when it happened.
Managing One System Versus Plugins and Extensions
Far too many content management systems require additional plugins and extensions to run what a business needs. A CMS like Wordpress is basic unless you add plugins for everything you need.
When this happens, the IT department is often stuck with adding payroll hours to the budget to manage updates, fixes, security monitoring, and more.
On the other hand, a system like HubSpot CMS Hub is a proprietary system where you don’t have to buy additional models and extensions. So instead of spending hours on maintenance, IT gets to work on more important work.
Here’s an example: We have a client who needed support for their Wordpress site. They're using Beaver Builder as the template pack to make the site look great and operate. Unfortunately, the client recently suffered a cyber attack where someone hacked their site.
Turns out, it's because they updated their Wordpress installation, but they didn't update the several different plugins necessary for Beaver Builder. Security waned and hackers got in.
Security for Users with Standard SSL
In today’s modern, digital climate, security should never be considered a luxury. Making SSL a reality for your business shouldn’t require a PhD. Every site hosted on the CMS Hub is automatically provisioned with a standard SSL certificate.
IT professionals know that SSL matters on a technical scale. Marketing professionals understand that SSL creates greater trust between your brand and visitors to your site while increasing your ranking within Google search results.
This new world of SSL is a win-win for both departments. In the CMS Hub Professional tier, your business gets an automatic standard SSL certificate.
Managing Multiple Domains
Whether your business has subsidiaries or sub-brands or multiple product lines, you may find the need to have multiple domains. IT is usually in charge of managing this task and it’s not a favorite of most IT managers.
Plus, multiple domains typically means multiple tools and disconnected analytics. HubSpot CMS Hub turns this challenge into an opportunity with multiple domain management.
This way as you grow and open up multiple business lines, or require more than just one brand domain, IT can empower marketing to manage the growth. And this way marketing can also track all your content within one HubSpot portal.
This feature is available in CMS Hub Enterprise (two included) or as an add-on.
Content Partitioning or Multiple Teams
Whether it’s keeping sensitive team information separate or simply putting boundaries between team functions, a CMS that can partition content is worth its weight in gold, so to speak. One that helps IT manage this while keeping marketing in its lane means your business is a modern rocket ship ready for takeoff [ROCKET EMOJI]!
With CMS Hub, you can use team permissions to give your team access to only the content that is important to them. For instance, at Impulse Creative our internal content team could access impulsecreative.com while the Sprocket Talk team has access only to sprockettalk.com.
For the IT managers, this feature in CMS Hub Enterprise helps you manage it easily or give permissions to your marketing manager so you’re not a task manager.
Reverse Proxy Support
IT managers who want to load all content from a single, trusted, domain hosted externally yet still empower a marketing team to create and manage content can do so with CMS Hub. It’s all within HubSpot’s easy-to-use content editing tools built on a secure tool to ease the load on IT.
CMS Hub Enterprise users can put this reverse proxy support to use on day one.
Custom CDN Configuration
Want to still maintain security controls while your marketing team runs their campaigns and creates that winning content your brand is known for?
In CMS Hub Enterprise, configurable CDN settings allow your IT teams to manage the security of your HubSpot hosted content, dictating how external visitors access your website for maximum protection.
Serverless Functions (via Lambda Support)
For those IT managers who want to delegate, this functionality wins accolades. Marketing can add interactive elements to HubSpot hosted content like event registrations, guest books and dynamic calculators, without the need to configure an external server, SSL certificate and data transfer process.
With CMS Hub Enterprise this feature helps take needless tasks off an IT manager’s plate and puts them into partnership with marketing, while allowing for peace of mind that marketing won’t break what IT built.
Here’s a powerful example. Ever used a calculator on a website to instantly give you a response based on your inputs? What about completing an event registration online where you saw details about the event as you signed up?
These web apps provide users with delight-worthy experiences. And they usually rely on server-side code. The problem? Managing servers is one of the biggest pain points of running a website, especially for IT managers.
With serverless functions in CMS Hub Enterprise, you can build powerful web apps that extend the functionality of your website. And your dev team never has to worry about managing servers or how a spike in traffic might impact your performance.
Is HubSpot CMS Hub Right for Your Business, IT Manager?
The fact is, whether it’s in IT’s hands or marketing, managing a website can be a chore. With a traditional CMS, IT managers like you are constantly worried about the security and performance of their website.
For marketing, it can be difficult to manage content and scale your site as you grow. Making simple edits to your site can be difficult to do without asking IT or a developer for help. Features from themes to drag and drop editing help make this a powerful tool for marketers who aren’t well-versed in IT.
CMS Hub provides you as an IT manager and your partner teams like marketing with security right out of the box and makes it easy to create and edit content on your own.
