Acquia, CI&T and Astellas Pharma Partner for Drupal Success in Japan

Information contained in this post originally appeared and was translated from the Markezine article Drupal 8 realizes global Web governance - Aim for Astellas Pharma to introduce CMS

Last month, Acquia and CI&T held “Acquia Day 2017”- an event for the Japanese tech community to become more familiar with Drupal 8 and hear customer success stories. One such story was Astellas Pharma and its use of Drupal and Acquia Cloud Site Factory to power its entire digital strategy.

When evaluating what CMS to build its global platform on, Astellas Pharma chose Drupal for its flexibility, ease-of-use, and multi-site management capabilities. Astellas Pharma also selected Drupal and Acquia for its corporate system because of Acquia’s ability to meet the strict security requirements of a global pharmaceutical.

Astellas Pharma actively partners with academia, research institutes, and biotech companies globally, with a sales network that covers more than 50 countries. With these partnerships and an expanding global presence, Drupal provided the critical tools for providing the latest company news and information to all stakeholders worldwide.

June saw the launch of the corporate site for a global audience with English and Japanese as the two initial languages. Using Site Factory, Astellas Pharma will continue to deliver more than 30 regional sites serving the Americas, EMEA, and Asian markets, which are all independently operated.

Speaking with Markezine, Mr. Masaaki Matsuda, part of the public relations department at Astellas Pharma, said "By unifying and managing websites of each country around the corporate site, Astellas' (digital properties are) centered around vision, standing at the cutting edge, changing medical care and scientific advances into patient value."

Astellas Pharma corporate site replatform was broken into three phases. The first was establishing web governance. The second was the application of new branding guidelines as part of the global expansion. Third was the global optimization of web / IT infrastructure in relation to the overall system strategy. In addition, the site needed to be responsive and easy to manage and scale without increasing resources.

Governance was an incredibly important aspect to the success of the project. By unifying systems into Drupal and Site Factory, changes are universally tracked, managed and acted upon by a core group. This oversight and security gives Astellas the ability to launch new country sites in a timely manner with the full knowledge that every site is fully protected by rigorous security and monitoring systems.

Along with governance, security was also a core requirement. Astellas Pharma needed a site that was secure, reliable and managed. Mr. Yoichiro Kawanami, section manager of the information system department, told Markezine “When deploying a global site, Drupal fit exactly into our information system strategy, meeting our business requirements and providing an architecture that is simple and easy to organise a global operation system on. (In addition) Acquia’s cloud platform has all of the functions necessary to use Drupal in the enterprise, and because it also includes cloud service expenses and infrastructure operation resources on a fixed basis, cost management is easy."

With the use of Acquia Cloud Site Factory, Astellas Pharma has been able to increase operational efficiency such as server configuration, capacity support corresponding to multiple load balancers, and so on. Acquia’s global operations team fully manages the entire cloud platform to ensure high availability and to proactively respond to any threats.

“We guarantee platform operation on 24 hours and 365 days, we also manage surveillance and operating environments,” Mr. Kawanami said, “So we have a complete system for troubleshooting. Security measures for WAF and CDN functions are provided through Acquia Cloud Edge Protect which can block malicious attacks.”

According to Mr. Kawanami, with its flexibility, security and dedicated community, Drupal and Acquia will become the standard of the future for enterprises in Japan and the wider Asia Pacific region.