Magento Enterprise 2.1 Cloud Edition

In April of this year Magento launched their revolutionary new offering, Magento Enterprise 2.1 Cloud Edition, with many citing it as a game changer for ecommerce. But what exactly is it and how can it work to benefit merchants, marketers and developers?

What is it?

Providing merchants with a ready-to-go environment and storefront, the Cloud Edition is a platform-as-a-service solution (PaaS), which combines new easy to use features with optimised hosting and Magento’s proven architecture.  A step up from Enterprise 1.X and 2.0, 2.1 includes all the content scheduling, administration and performance management tools needed for creating superior shopping experiences online.

What are the benefits?

Hosted and fully supported, this new offering has been developed in partnership with market-leading solutions and applications to deliver an unrivalled technology stack.  Unlike its predecessors, Enterprise 2.1 is self-hosted and been built on AWS (Amazon Web Services) to deliver global availability zones, redundancy and elastic scalability.  Find a list along with individual benefits of just some of these partnerships here.

Say goodbye to DDoS attacks with Fastly’s real-time CDN (content delivery network). Helping to keep sensitive data safe, Fastly inspects traffic to your site to quickly diagnose problems and make changes for improved performance.

On top of this, merchants can also benefit from Platform.sh deployment cloud hosting and additional performance monitoring from Blackfire and New Relic.

If you’re not already impressed then Magento outlines further some of the key benefits to merchants and marketers:

• Preview and schedule a range of new content such as product updates and promotional campaigns easily and efficiently, including the ability to share staged updates for quicker review and approval from other team members. Scheduling updates mean changes are launched and removed automatically, all of which helps to boost productivity and sales.
• Increase those all-important conversion rates thanks to new PayPal In-Context checkout enhancements that let customers pay and securely store card details with PayPal without leaving your site, simplifying the whole process and encouraging purchase frequency – great for merchants but more importantly great for your customers too.  
• The already easy to use Magento management system is even easier with new admin features and simplified forms that improve and speed up the whole process of creating new products and content.

All of this and more means merchants and team members are better equipped to drive the customer experience and grow sales, all without having to worry about the day to day infrastructure thanks to the all in one offering. 

Who is it for?

The Cloud Edition is ideal for medium to large retailers looking to outsource server infrastructure and simplify vendor management. Inclusive of Magento’s Enterprise support and SLA, you’ll get a fully customisable, secure and scalable storefront optimised for rapid deployments and performance meaning you can hit the ground running.

As with all new technology decisions you should consider the suitability for your business. Built on AWS to provide instant and guaranteed availability, you’ll only see the real performance benefits of Enterprise Cloud Edition if you’re running multiple storefronts globally and are prone to traffic spikes. Whilst there are cost benefits to the all-encompassing package, every business is different and so this may not prove the case for your business depending on its size and needs. That being said there are a huge amount of positives to the Magento Cloud Edition, so if you’re not sure whether it’s the right move for you get in touch with one of our team today to find out more.