Bringing Control, Consistency and Compliance to Global Multisite Management

Acquia is a leader in multisite delivery and governance tools for IT digital teams to deliver and centrally manage all of their sites, digital experiences, and applications across multiple brands.

Our solution, Acquia Cloud Site Factory, solves the complexities around managing hundreds or even thousands of sites – making global site governance, delivery, and brand consistency possible at scale.

In September 2016, we added Stacks to Acquia Cloud Site Factory to bring greater scalability and agility to multisite management.

With Stacks, groups of sites with similar digital business needs such as functionality, infrastructure, or corporate requirements, can be provisioned to independent Stacks where disparate teams across regions and brands can still centrally govern them. Teams can deploy and manage multiple Stacks within a central management console for all of their sites and experiences, each with their own dedicated cloud infrastructure and shared codebase. Sites running on multiple versions of Drupal can also be managed independently on the same platform in a common console.

New sites can be launched (in minutes!) and legacy apps and services can be integrated through the platform’s open APIs. The result is more flexibility and speed to delivery, without loss of control. Digital governance continues to be a top priority for enterprise organizations [CIOs and IT digital platform owners] as laws around data privacy and sovereignty evolve.

Enterprises managing multiple brands across regions may prefer to isolate [separately govern] their business units’ digital properties, including processes, sites and technologies, so digital marketing and business teams only have access to the tools they use locally to make meeting compliance requirements easier. For instance, organizations may want data and hardware hosted in a specific region to maintain local data privacy or sovereignty requirements.

Or, they may want to split hosting between regions so that some of their digital properties live in one location while other digital assets are stored in another. Unfortunately, this practice may result in redundant systems and platforms, a fragmented user experience across brands and geos, and ultimately, high maintenance cost. Multi-region governance starts to address the challenges around how organizations can better implement and enforce compliance standards locally.

To further empower IT digital teams to easily centralize digital governance best practices, we are pleased to announce new multi-region governance capabilities available today within Acquia Cloud Site Factory. These new features solve the complexities that organizations face around digital governance by giving IT digital teams more flexibility when building, delivering, and managing digital experiences at scale so they can reduce risk, ensure compliance, and minimize costs. New features to Acquia Cloud Site Factory include:

Multi-region Functionality for Stacks

Multi-region functionality is now available within Acquia Cloud Site Factory Stacks to make it even easier for organizations to implement governance standards in local regions. When it comes to managing data and digital content across multiple countries or regions, organizations may want to take a proactive approach to complying with local regulations, privacy laws or corporate requirements.

Multi-region Stacks supports delivery and governance for multiple sites and experiences, allowing organizations to both manage, and host, all of their digital properties in the particular region their brand and site are located from one central management console.

Multiple code bases with a dedicated cloud infrastructure for each Stack can be supported, making it faster for IT digital teams to get new sites up and running in their local region quickly. Organizations can manage multiple sites in each Stack and simply ‘turn on’ a particular region for a Stack to fulfill local regulatory requirements.

Each Stack functions as a separate space of dedicated resources and a fine-tuned distribution with a common set of codebases. Multi-region Stacks provides IT digital platform owners with a common platform and governance approach to managing digital experiences across various regions, which translates into reduced costs, minimized risk, and greater oversight over all of the organization’s digital applications.

Centralized Role Management for Drupal 8

Acquia Cloud Site Factory now provides more flexible identity management for all of our customers’ websites. Customers have the option to use centralized role management for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 websites. This enables IT digital to have more granular control over who in their organization or broader partner network has access to their sites.

Customers can make identity management changes to users in Site Factory that can be sent to the Drupal environment. For example, customers can make name and email address changes from Site Factory directly to their websites. In addition, customers can integrate Site Factory with their own identity provider(s) to authenticate users by means of security tokens, such as SAML 2.0, for ease of adoption and use.

REST API Updates

We continue to evolve and deliver on APIs, support them, and make them compatible with existing solutions and tools; this enables customers to have greater flexibility and control over their management console to support open integration possibilities while still maintaining stringent compliance requirements over all of their digital applications.

There are three new REST API endpoints that are responsible for adding a site to a site collection, removing a site from a site collection, and making a site primary in a site collection. Organizations can extend APIs to any of their digital technologies in an automated fashion, lowering the complexity and risk of managing multiple systems globally, while increasing velocity.

APIs can be used to connect Acquia Cloud Site Factory with a customer’s in-house tools (such as an existing reporting or internal dashboard) to build unified management consoles for the business, increasing visibility, further automating, and enforcing governance standards.

With evolving rulings around data privacy and sovereignty, and how digital information is used and shared, it will be important for organizations to invest in a digital governance strategy and digital platform in order to manage their sites and content effectively.

Acquia Cloud Site Factory offers a powerful advantage for enterprises that want to move fast and build and deploy new sites and campaigns to maintain a competitive edge in the market, while still maintaining governance over all of their digital experiences and applications.

Our new multi-region governance capabilities help further address the common challenges enterprise organizations face around building, delivering, and managing digital experiences globally.

Acquia Cloud Site Factory is the only digital platform for multisite management that has the flexibility to support multiple development teams, compliance standards, and versions of Drupal – all within a single delivery and management solution.

With these new updates, we continue to enable different teams, brands, and regions to easily implement and govern all of their digital experiences globally at scale, now and in the future.

Want to learn more? See how customers like Nasdaq, Warner Music Group, Australian Department of Finance, and SABMiller are using Acquia Cloud Site Factory to manage and govern all of their digital experience initiatives.