Acquia Cloud Site Factory Stacks Offers Scalability, Enhanced Multisite Management

Acquia, a Boston-based digital experience provider, is adding new capabilities to its enterprise cloud solution to help organizations centralize governance as well as build and deliver websites and experiences.

The new capabilities — called Acquia Cloud Site Factory Stacks — is designed to bring greater scalability and control to multisite management. It will support multiple development teams, regions, brands, compliance standards and versions of Drupal, all with a single solution, the company noted.

Acquia is powered by Drupal the open-source web content management system.

Eliminating Redundant Systems

Enterprises manage an average of 268 customer-facing websites, according to Forrester Research. David Butler, platform executive at Acquia, said siloed teams often work with different content types and in disconnected content management systems and applications. 

“It becomes increasingly complex to ensure that all experiences are personalized and on-brand,” Butler told CMSWire. 

Acquia Cloud Site Factory Stacks “tackles these challenges” with a centralized cloud management console, allowing for the deployment and management of multiple stacks, each consisting of a platform codebase and dedicated cloud resources to support multiple sites and, ultimately, eliminate redundant systems and platforms.

For the first time with Stacks, users can create a variety of groupings to support different digital business needs, from functionality to regional deployment and governance controls, and manage them in a common dashboard, Butler added. 

“The new solution allows dramatically different sites, requiring unique digital experience functionality or infrastructure, to be centrally delivered and managed,” he said. “Importantly, Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 sites can now be managed independently, all within a unified management console. In addition, all sites within an organization can now be centrally viewed and managed, while disparate teams may deploy their own sites on their own Stack.”

Integration Strengths

Butler called integration a “strong competitive advantage of Site Factory.” It allows users to deploy any Drupal module available, and to integrate with apps and services through open APIs. It includes open integrations with REST-based APIs.

“Stacks opens up many more options,” he said. “With Stacks, we recommend customers plan ahead and develop a governance model for multiple brands, regions and IT policies.”

This is the first major release of Acquia Cloud Site Factory since its 2013 debut. 

“Gone are the days when marketing teams can just create campaign sites without some guardrails from IT, without which brands can end up with multiple content platforms, duplicate tools, and high maintenance costs,” Christopher Stone, chief products officer at Acquia, said in a statement. 

“Today’s digital experience teams need to build a culture of creativity and automation.”