How To

The Ultimate Guide to Content Orchestration

June 1, 2023 | min

Content orchestration conceptualized as the organization of notes on a board

 

Digital content is everywhere, and every business needs to generate high-quality content to keep pace with the market and appeal to customers. IT companies can take this one step further by leveraging their content strategies as part of the journey toward expanding their presence in the enterprise cloud. As you strive to optimize company-wide content workflows, you need a content orchestration strategy that simplifies the process.

Key Takeaways:

  • Building any type of orchestration strategy begins and ends with automation.
  • Challenges in adopting orchestration include resource allocation and achieving functionality in the initial setup.
  • Implementing orchestration is often a positive step forward for businesses looking for cost efficiency and agility.

Learn more about building an orchestration strategy, practical use cases in the content creation sphere, and the pitfalls you might encounter along the way with our guide.

What Is Content Orchestration?

Orchestration in the IT space refers to the automated management and coordination of applications and services, as well as the underlying systems beneath everything. Content orchestration, then, is a methodology that facilitates the creation of content through automatically configured workflows at any scale within an organization.

Businesses with the goal of migrating workloads to the cloud, or adopting a hybrid cloud approach, have an inherent need for centralized workflows that make the most of the advantages provided by the cloud. Orchestration at the content planning level makes this centralization more attainable and can even hasten the transition to a multi-cloud environment.

Other benefits of implementing orchestration include:

  • Simplified management of content across multiple teams or channels
  • Greater agility and faster time to deployment
  • Reduced friction in accomplishing tasks through automation

MarTech reports that 67% of marketers replaced at least one marketing application during a 12-month period for the sake of digital transformation. This statistic illustrates the constant need to grow and adapt when generating content for marketing or social media, a process streamlined through the use of proper content orchestration.

How Do You Build a Content Orchestration Strategy?

The goal is to ensure accessibility and facilitate collaboration throughout the content creation pipeline while making all content centrally visible to everyone. This starts with configuring and optimizing tasks in preparation for end-to-end automation.

Orchestration exists on a foundation of automation, which improves efficiency by reducing the need for human interaction with certain repetitive processes. Your orchestration strategy will likely employ automation for monitoring system health through frequent vulnerability scans, compliance testing, and configuration validation.

Similarly, automated orchestration also accounts for aggregating event logs across the network for the sake of error visibility. These security measures ensure that content teams can focus on outcomes while also minimizing the risk of costly downtime.

Orchestration becomes a more apparent aspect of the content creation process when teams start to work together. The orchestration software provides a central location to seamlessly access content from across the organization. The interface can automatically populate with content using a common structure that is familiar to all parties involved.

What Are the Challenges in Implementing Content Orchestration?

Resource allocation is the first and most obvious hurdle to cross when planning content orchestration. While businesses operating in a cloud environment can usually procure resources with minimal effort, you might face difficulties if your organization relies on on-premises hardware. The process may require expanding your data center, adding to the list of devices you must upkeep and maintain. 

Another problem that may arise comes in the form of standardization. Specifically, orchestration efforts may fail if your infrastructure lacks the ability to accommodate standardized configurations that you can reuse for processes on a company-wide scale. 

Orchestration allows for automated configuration throughout workflows, but it goes without saying that the initial configuration will be manual. This presents a potential pitfall if a human error during configuration setup leaves an opening for possible data breaches.

Even when an effective strategy is on the table and solutions exist for all known problems, the need for stakeholder and leadership buy-in can present a final barrier preventing the implementation of content orchestration. It is necessary to account for pitching and selling the concept to management as an essential part of the initial strategy.

When Is Content Orchestration the Right Solution?

Adopting orchestration software is an investment like any other, and that means understanding when the investment will yield worthwhile returns. For example, orchestration may be the right solution if you are attempting content creation in a complex cloud environment that is not conducive to interactions between the systems in use.

Thorough introspection of your content practices might also reveal that your teams are expending significant manual effort to achieve competent security and compliance. Automation through orchestration is a cost-efficient alternative that allows individual creators to shift focus on higher-yield processes.

Automating the simpler tasks gives teams the opportunity to spend production time increasing the quality and frequency of content generation. When your current content cycles fall short of meeting business or customer needs, orchestration might provide the necessary boost.

Content orchestration has a number of practical use cases, particularly in marketing. You can launch new marketing campaigns quickly and react to new developments with great agility. Efficient organization makes it possible to achieve brand consistency and even drive upsells and cross-sells at the local or regional scale.

What Are the Best Content Orchestration Tools?

The ideal orchestration platform for content creation is one that takes a modular approach. With a simple interface, users can easily access modules and locate the content resources needed for any given task all in one central location.

The Nutanix Cloud Manager is well-suited to empowering orchestration in a cloud environment. Through thorough security governance, optimized automation, and simple self-service options, businesses can utilize the platform to effectively manage content even in a complicated multi-cloud setting. 

Problems with resource allocation and configuration can become non-issues when the content orchestration provider gives comprehensive support throughout the adoption process. The best tool for the job is the one that prioritizes simplicity for users without compromising on functionality or security. 

Learn more about other ways you can rethink cloud workloads and how orchestration powers DevOps in business.

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