If you’ve reached the limits of what your current email infrastructure can do, it may be a good time to consider migrating to an enterprise-grade email infrastructure that’s designed to handle high-volume scale without sacrificing performance.
Whether you are a Martech provider or an Email Service Provider (ESP), the complexity of handling high email volumes, ensuring deliverability, and maintaining security can be daunting.
For Martech providers, the challenge is that they often rely on third-party solutions accessed via SMTP or API. Building a new infrastructure can seem overwhelming. However, a plug-and-play solution like Halon can alleviate this complexity, offering brands better control with the same ease and effectiveness without incurring significant architectural complexities. Additionally, the cost of running email on their own infrastructure is considerably more beneficial compared to the expenses associated with cloud APIs.
For ESPs, the bigger challenge is often dealing with outdated software that was built for the past and is not equipped for today’s or future needs. They require a future-ready software solution that can prepare them for tomorrow. Halon stands out as the only email infrastructure solution that enables ESPs to elevate their delivery experience to a higher level.
That said, when considering a large-scale email infrastructure migration, it’s important to map out your strategy carefully to ensure that your new infrastructure meets all of your business needs, and that you can safely transition your customers with minimal disruptions to day-to-day operations.
Here are some of the key considerations to review when planning your migration:
Before architecting a new solution, it’s important to carefully analyze where your current solution falls short. Review historical issues from the last 12 months to understand trends in performance. By tracking your issues and resolution times, you’ll be able to identify bottlenecks in email flow, feature gaps, and areas where your deliverability team is spending excessive time.
As you evaluate your business needs, you can also look for opportunities to expedite the development of essential enhancements, such as blocking toxic domains at a global level, or introducing a new authentication policy to cater to new sender guidelines from Gmail and Yahoo.
Audit your tech stack, and evaluate the integrations needed to ensure your team’s smooth operations. If you need to build integrations with existing or new components, make sure that you prioritize their development so that you’re not lacking access to critical tools when you deploy your new solution.
Don’t simply consider where your business is today—evaluate where you’d like to be five or ten years from now and ensure that you’re selecting a solution with the operational power to help you scale effortlessly.
By identifying and eliminating redundant operational tasks, you’ll be able to improve your delivery team’s overall efficiency. Automating manual tasks will enable you to reallocate resources to more critical areas, enhancing productivity across the board.
3. Plan and set up your hardware infrastructure
When designing your infrastructure, consider factors like separating transactional and promotional emails, regional setups, or industry-specific configurations, and map out your system requirements and release schedule accordingly.
It’s also important to ensure that you have the right technology platforms in place to support continuous delivery. Making use of containerization can help your team quickly build and test new features, minimizing the risk of software bugs as you roll out new releases.
Docker efficiently packages and distributes apps into packages known as containers, which enable software teams to quickly build, test, and deploy software in an isolated environment. With Docker, your development team can set up and test new software features in a controlled environment before rolling out changes to the broader user base.
Depending on the size of your code base, you may also need a solution like Kubernetes to help you manage a large volume of containers simultaneously. The open-source platform, initially developed by Google, orchestrates container runtime systems across a networked cluster. It can function with or without Docker, offering flexible deployment options. Kubernetes optimizes network efficiency and resource utilization by grouping containers into managed sets on the same machine.
Once your production environment is ready to deploy, it’s important to conduct a phased rollout to minimize the risk of errors impacting a large customer base. Start with a small test group to validate your deployment process and ensure everything is functioning properly. Then, gradually increase the number of containers or services being migrated until all customers are fully transitioned to the new environment.
During this phased rollout, it's important to closely monitor performance. Correct any issues that arise within your test group and confirm that the system is performing as intended before rolling out the changes to the rest of your customer base. This will help ensure a smooth transition for your customers and minimize disruption to their experience.
Communicate with your customers throughout the migration process. Inform them of any changes they may experience and provide support resources in case they encounter problems. Encourage them to report any bugs quickly so that you can resolve issues as swiftly as possible.
By conducting a phased rollout and effectively communicating with your customers, you can avoid potential downtime or disruptions during the migration process. This will ensure a seamless transition to your new email infrastructure.
Developing a solid strategy, allocating proper resources to implement and support your project, and staging your deployment in phases will help ensure that you’ll be able to flawlessly execute your email infrastructure migration project. Halon’s expert team and resources can provide guidance and support with implementation and ongoing maintenance, and your development team can draw from our extensive technical documentation to pull together a customized solution that meets your unique needs. By migrating to Halon, you’ll be able to set up an email infrastructure that can stand the test of time as your business scales.
Want to learn more about the benefits of choosing Halon for your email infrastructure? Get in touch for a demo.