AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Powering Digital Government with AWS and Acquia Digital Experience Platform
By Pal Patel, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Rob Ellis, Principal Solutions Engineer – Acquia
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| Acquia |
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In the intricate landscape of government technology where innovation and security intersect, the collaboration between Acquia and Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a digital experience platform for public sector agencies.
Acquia expands Drupal’s open-source CMS capabilities, and coupled with AWS cloud infrastructure, delivers modern digital experiences for government organizations. Complying with the 21st Century IDEA mandate, Acquia’s FedRAMP Moderate certified, API-first, cloud-native digital experience platform (DXP) provides the flexibility and robust security required for transforming citizen digital services through omnichannel experiences.
This post explores Acquia’s Drupal Cloud on AWS, which offers a range of products, services, and support for Drupal, available on AWS Marketplace. As an AWS Specialization Partner with Competencies in Government, Education, and Marketing and Advertising Technology, Acquia enhances Drupal with enterprise-grade security, governance, and scalability through its cloud offerings.
Challenges of Digital Government
Citizens expect government services to offer consumer-grade experiences, accessible anytime, anywhere, and on any device. However, most government agencies struggle to deliver due to challenges around optimizing digital velocity, creating productive citizen journeys, and implementing organizational brand management. These challenges manifest as high scaling costs, fragmented customer experiences, inconsistent brand experiences, and siloed data across legacy IT systems that are difficult to secure and update. Consequently, agencies cannot scale operations and instead expend resources maintaining legacy systems while the need for new digital experiences grows.
Acquia’s Digital Experience Platform
Acquia provides industry-leading products, services, and support for the Drupal CMS. The company’s CTO and co-founder is the creator of the Drupal open-source content management framework.
Combined with AWS’s secure and resilient cloud infrastructure, Acquia powers transformational digital government experiences.
Figure 1 – Acquia digital experience platform
Acquia Cloud Platform
Acquia Cloud Platform provides a fully-managed, cloud-native solution that delivers robust security and high performance for building, launching, managing, and optimizing Drupal-based applications. Being natively built on AWS and its API-first approach results in extensibility, allowing the platform to integrate with various AWS services to enhance the user experience. It leverages several AWS managed services, allowing Acquia’s customers to seamlessly adopt a secure and reliable cloud infrastructure without the need for direct management. The platform’s architecture utilizes Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for container orchestration, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for file storage, and Amazon Aurora for relational databases, among other AWS services, to enhance performance, security, and reliability. Further insights into Acquia’s cloud platform offerings and their integration with AWS can be explored in this blog.
The Acquia Cloud Platform offers several key features that enhance the digital experience for public service agencies. It provides
- Up to 60% performance in page load times.
- Guaranteed reliability with 99.99% along with multi-zone availability, multi-region fail-over clusters, and disaster recovery services.
- CMS migration velocity.
- Low-code site building to enable business users to build and deploy content, freeing up critical development resources.
- Drupal expert support available 24/7/365; custom solution planning and implementation; and dedicated technical account managers.
With Acquia Cloud Platform, public service agencies avoid large upfront infrastructure costs and have clear insight and transparency into ongoing, multi-year costs. Acquia automates hosting, patching, scaling, and more, allowing IT teams to focus on building apps rather than just keeping the lights on.
Acquia Site Studio
Acquia Site Studio is a low-code Drupal site builder that provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface plus 350+ pre-built components to assemble pages visually. It empowers non-technical staff to easily create and update content rich websites.
It can deliver a 40% reduction in time to market, an 80% reduction in operational costs, and a 17% increase in team productivity. This provides a low-code site building solution that provides all users in organizations the freedom to create and update content efficiently to meet evolving customer demands for digital content.
Acquia Site Factory
Acquia Site Factory provides a centralized place to build, manage, update, and secure sites and digital applications at scale. It enables digital teams to become service providers that create, build, and manage the digital portfolio, rather than bottlenecks to digital creativity.
With Site Factory, users build and maintain a single Drupal codebase while Acquia Site Factory maintains server and platform configurations. This allows non-technical users to create new sites with the click of a button and technical users to automate code updates while ensuring the security standards are met.
Acquia Edge Performance and Security
Edge Performance – CDN
Acquia Edge CDN offers a highly customizable global content delivery network designed to speed up application delivery, enhance mobile experiences, and ensure continuous availability. With global reach and hundreds of points of presence (PoPs) worldwide, it allows customers to reach up to 95% of the world’s internet-connected population almost instantaneously, ensuring they can engage with your brand’s content wherever they are.
Edge CDN enables sites to handle traffic surges seamlessly, maintaining performance without slowdowns.
Edge Security – WAAP
Acquia Edge Web Application & API Protection (WAAP) provides top-tier security from day one, featuring enterprise-grade protections such as a Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DDoS mitigation to safeguard applications against malicious attacks and protect digital experiences. With access to hundreds of standard rulesets for blocking vulnerabilities, it prevents the need for reactionary disaster cleanup. This proactive security approach helps eliminate the risk of breaches, preserving and enhancing brand value by preventing negative impacts.
Edge Security – Bot Management
Bot Management, an additional layer of Edge Security, enhances visibility and control over bot traffic impacting your digital experiences. Key features include:
- Access to a directory of over 1,400 known bots across 17 categories.
- Real-time and historical reporting on bot traffic.
- Detection of traffic from unknown bots.
By preventing price and content scraping, you can maintain a competitive advantage and retain control over customer relationships. This protection also reduces financial risks associated with web fraud and lowers costs by slowing the growth of your web infrastructure and reducing IT overhead needed for bot management. Additionally, it improves user experience by minimizing the impact of bots on servers during business hours.
Acquia Code Studio
Acquia Code Studio means customers no longer need to procure, set up, and maintain tools for issue management, DevOps, and code collaboration. Acquia provides a Drupal-specialized version of GitLab with the subscription, reducing the total time and cost of building and owning Drupal applications on the Acquia Cloud Platform.
Accelerate production with a complete toolset that enables teams to plan, build, test, review, and deploy from a single, customizable workflow that integrates with Acquia Cloud Platform. Unlike every other continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) method, users don’t need to build their own CI/CD process. Acquia’s turnkey and customizable solution builds and manages a DevOps workflow with best practices built in.
- Powered by GitLab: Acquia hosts and manages the GitLab instance to deliver the best tools possible for Drupal development.
- Auto DevOps: Automatically build, test, and deploy with managed CI/CD pipelines, while inheriting Acquia’s configurable build pipeline. This will install dependencies, scan and test your code, create a review environment, and deploy to production when ready.
- Automatic updates: Automatically update composer packages, replace deprecated custom code, and submit changes for review in a merge request with a dedicated review environment.
With Acquia Code Studio, coders get a streamlined, cloud-based development workflow centralized in one tool.
Conclusion
Together with AWS, Acquia provides an enterprise-grade, cloud-native digital experience platform tailored to public sector needs. Agencies can rapidly deliver unified, personalized digital services across channels to improve constituent experiences and lower costs.
Importantly, the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act positions Acquia as an ISV Partner for public sector digital modernization. By leveraging open-source flexibility along with software-as-a-service (SaaS) convenience and cloud scale, government IT can innovate faster and enables true digital transformation aligned to citizen expectations.
For more information, check out how Acquia and AWS are better together.
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Acquia – AWS Partner Spotlight
Acquia is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Competency Partner that offers a secure platform-as-a-service cloud environment for the Drupal web content management system, advanced multi-site management, powerful developer tools, and software-as-a-service capabilities for personalization, content syndication, and more.