Can you reduce Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) expenses without losing performance? You can, and KBWEB Consult can help you.

My prior article, “Adopting AEM Provides Positive ROI,” focused on the financial gains your organization receives from adopting AEM tools for faster creation of new assets, faster rendering of existing assets, and faster content delivery. These capabilities let your prospects become customers more quickly, leading to higher sales.

But what of the other side of the income statement, cost containment? Proper use of Adobe Experience Manager can help mid-sized enterprises reduce AEM expenses.

Cost optimization vs. cost cutting

But before proceeding, let’s differentiate between “cost optimization” and “cost cutting.” An Adobe blog post describes the difference:

Cost optimization involves a continuous look at spending. The goal is to reduce spending, without sacrificing service. It differs from cost-cutting because it’s a proactive approach, rather than a reactive approach to reducing spending. Cost-cutting is often the last resort. It happens when the only real option you have left is cutting costs or closing down. And, it leads to decreased levels of service for customers.

On the other hand, cost optimization is a conscientious practice that should be a regular part of any business. If you optimize costs properly, you don’t have to worry about cutting them. Instead, you see a boost in profits, you create long-term sustainability, and you reduce the number of wasted resources in your system.

So where can your organization optimize costs?

Six ways to optimize AEM costs and reduce AEM expenses

There are six ways you can optimize costs:

  1. Reduce content requests. Because AEM pricing is tied to the number of content requests, an obvious exploratory point for cost optimization is the number of content requests your users are sending. If you can reduce the number of content requests without penalizing your customer experience, you will reduce your costs. Some of the tips below help you do this.
  2. Manage your caching via AEM’s Dispatcher. If you intelligently manage your caching, you can reduce unnecessary content requests, letting you reduce your AEM expenses. AEM supports extreme granularity in controlling caching requests.
  3. Optimize your use of GraphQL. AEM’s GraphQL supports headless (multi-layered) implementations and manages content fragments. You can optimize your configuration and use of GraphQL by using persisted GraphQL queries, controlling cache as recommended above, limiting the number of content fragments that share the same model, and adopting other best practices.
  4. Optimize your code. While this may not be a programmer’s dream task, optimized code can load pages faster, reduce server loads, lower CPU and memory usage, reduce network bandwidth, and provide other benefits that translate to the bottom line and reduce your AEM expenses.
  5. Clean up your outdated content. Use AEM’s ability to define content expiration dates to identify content you will never use again. If you will never publish that video again, why keep it?
  6. Use Smart Imaging to optimize image presentation. When your site employs Smart Imaging, AEM dynamically changes aspects of the image, including its compression level, to align with the channel (such as a mobile website) displaying the image.

Three ways to use AEM performance monitoring to reduce AEM expenses

But the one most powerful way to reduce AEM expenses is to regularly consult and act upon AEM’s performance monitoring capabilities.

AEM as a Cloud Service users enjoy access to hundreds of cloud-native monitors that continuously report on site status. Here are three examples:

  1. Service Edge Monitoring. Service Edge Monitoring accesses only production environments, and the calculated metrics are used to determine your customer’s SLA. Detected unavailability generates an alert to Adobe.
  2. Custom Monitoring. For customers with their own content delivery network (CDN) with Adobe’s Advanced Cloud Support, Custom Monitoring can be provided. Again, detected unavailability generates an alert to Adobe.
  3. Internal Module Monitoring. AEM also monitors a number of internal modules that are not directly perceived by website visitors. Examples of monitored events include CPU iowait percentages, instance redeployments, disk usage, author repository sizes, backup operations, database health and performance, and cloud services. If any of these fall outside recommended limits, correct them immediately.

When you optimize your costs, and when you take corrective actions when monitoring your performance, you not only improve the health of your system, but also reduce any runaway costs from adverse issues.

Correct issues to reduce AEM expenses

But when you examine your system, examine more than the technical issues. When KBWEB Consult conducts an AEM Resurgence for a client with a stalled project, one of the first things that I do is to conduct an “implementation health check” on the status of the project. The resulting project status report may reveal business issues that are keeping your AEM expenses high.

If you would like my guidance on how to reduce your AEM expenses, please contact KBWEB Consult.