The marketing industry is currently on track for explosive expansion. As marketing departments and strategies shift toward digital platforms and channels, marketing professionals are also seeing their roles and responsibilities beginning to coincide with IT teams. As a result, there is a rising demand for data hosting solutions that can scale, keeping up with continual growth and digital innovation. To maintain a competitive edge in this dynamic field, marketing businesses need to invest in the most flexible, scalable, and high-performance hosting solutions – which typically involves a hybridized infrastructure approach.
Marketing’s Current Hosting Strategy
The marketing industry has traditionally relied on high-performance infrastructure and data hosting solutions to process data in real-time, supporting tasks like dynamic targeting, bid management, ad fraud detection, and analytics. As an example, trusted technologies like Apache Kafka or Aerospike, which require fast read/write speeds, are commonly used for data pipeline efficiency. This tends to lead to a preference for bare metal servers due to their low-latency, on-board storage and economic advantages. Conversely, newer technologies (like AI applications) involve an increasing number of heavy compute workloads to operate as efficiently as intended. If these workloads are transient, the infrastructure strategy probably involves cloud-based GPU instancing, while those with more static workloads may gravitate towards a more traditional, metal-based approach. These types of technological shifts are forcing marketers and their IT teams to reassess the capabilities of their current solutions.
Zoom Out: The Marketing Industry’s Growth
The marketing industry’s reliance on traditional, on-premises servers and collocated solutions is making it hard for marketing firms to keep up with the rapid growth and increasing use of advanced technologies. A recent study reported a substantial 27.8% year-over-year growth in the industry, with the number of available MarTech solutions increasing from 11,038 to 14,106 between 2023 and now. However, relying solely on physical servers presents limitations in terms of scalability and workload balancing. In the past, companies needed to invest in additional hardware or load-balancing solutions, resulting in underutilization and inefficiencies.
While some businesses still favor on-premises solutions, Gartner experts predict that by 2028, the cloud will become essential for businesses, with global public cloud services spending expected to reach $679 billion this year. As the marketing sector continues to expand, companies are increasingly turning to vertical scaling, in the cloud, allowing them to adapt to fluctuating demand and optimize their workloads without concerns about excess hardware and overspending.
Hybrid Hosting
For the best of both worlds, businesses can strategically optimize their computing resources by utilizing a hybrid environment that combines both cloud and bare metal hosting options. This approach enables companies to efficiently adjust the amount of compute and storage capacity to meet their needs, leading to cost-optimization and increased flexibility. Embracing a hybrid architecture allows marketing organizations to dynamically scale their resources based on demand, paying only for the resources they use at different operational stages.
As digital demands continue to evolve, marketers should carefully consider diversifying their infrastructure and integrating cloud solutions to achieve seamless scalability and improved performance for their modern digital work.
Leaseweb’s Hybrid Solutions
To our marketing colleagues and beyond, we want to help customize and build a solution that is tailored to your organization’s unique needs. Our team of experts are ready to help you and your company set up the most flexible, efficient, and redundant hosting infrastructure to assist with your advanced workload and cost-optimization needs. Contact us today or click the link to learn more about our industry leading hybrid solutions.