Why Drupal Is the Smart Choice for Enterprise Content Management

The Drupal content management system (CMS) enables thousands of organizations worldwide to build and manage ambitious digital experiences. It’s a powerful tool for easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. 

But, in a rapidly changing digital environment, marketing and development teams need to build experiences more quickly and seamlessly integrate processes and technologies. For large enterprises, this need for quick go-to-market, seamless integrations, and tip-top performance is magnified. 

Let’s explore how Drupal, the open source CMS behind world class digital experiences, benefits global enterprises such as Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, Mars, and Stanley, Black and Decker. 

Enterprise content management with Drupal

Enterprise content management is no small endeavor. The largest brands on the planet have to maintain consistent digital experiences across the globe and manage their brand’s (and subbrands’) digital presence. Talk about doing everything everywhere all at once. 

Having the appropriate technology to handle those vast content needs is crucial to success at the enterprise level. It’s why some of the most beloved brands use Drupal to deliver world-class digital experiences, be they corporate websites, mobile apps, digital signage, or intranet portals. 

Benefits of Drupal

This list could take up a lot of space, but for the sake of getting the full picture in a few points, we’ve selected a handful of broad benefits.

Deliver superior omnichannel experiences: With support for headless Drupal projects, your enterprise can build experiences that combine Drupal’s robust back-end capabilities with front-end experiences rendered to the platforms where your customers live, no matter what they use most — social media, mobile app, or whatever!

Ensure a future-ready digital presence: As an open solution, you’re free to integrate with different technologies across your organization’s tech stack. Drupal ensures that your marketing technologies can adapt to changes in the digital landscape and emerging technologies, channels, and devices.

Hybrid content management: Combine the best parts of traditional and headless content management and posture your enterprise to be able to meet omnichannel content demands. Deploy content wherever your prospects and customers are looking and control it in a centralized system unfettered by front end presentation. 

Performance: Enterprise-level performance is what your customers have come to expect. With only a 2-second page load delay resulting in 87% of site abandonments, poor site performance isn’t an option. Fortunately, Drupal supports global availability with tons of failsafes in place that make many of the largest, highest-profile sporting events in the world confident enough to pick Drupal. 

Security: Drupal has security locked down. With a team of more than 30 people wholly dedicated to security, Drupal is a digital fortress that will protect your customers and your enterprise. Plus, with 10,000+ contributors, bugs don’t stand a chance. Which is a part of the reason why Drupal is trusted by agencies that value security at the highest level: the Department of Justice, Metro Transit Authority, and USPS, to name a few. 

Benefits of Acquia for Drupal

Drupal is excellent standing on its own, but with Acquia, enterprises stand to enhance Drupal into something almost too good to be true (but, it’s definitely true). 

Simplify management: Acquia’s fully managed Drupal hosting solution frees digital teams from managing infrastructure. Meet growth, traffic, and performance demands with high availability hosting in seven global regions and a 99.99% SLA. Relax and shift your focus from maintenance to innovation.

Launch digital experiences quickly: With superior development tools and environments out of the box, Acquia makes it easy for digital teams to immediately begin building Drupal-based experiences.

Scale easier: Build and manage hundreds of sites from a single platform. Mars used Drupal and Acquia to cut brand site development time by 20-40% and deployed 55 brand sites in just 10 months.

Developer tools: It’d be cool to have a fully cloud-based developer environment with built in developer tools tailored to Drupal, right? You can. Between Acquia Code Studio and Acquia Cloud IDE, you can create, control, and publish code from one place. Automated DevOps makes sure that everything is on pace and on time, so your developers can focus on doing what they do best: developing.

Marketing tools: Can’t forget about the marketers. Where developers are spoiled, so are marketers with the power to create and publish content in no-code and low-code environments. All without having to bother developers for content updates. Acquia Site Studio makes this possible, while Personalization helps marketing teams tailor that content to specific audiences. All the while, harnessing customer data for better personalization and managing digital assets for the most brand consistent content to put in front of customers.

How to leverage Drupal and Acquia for your enterprise

We’ve covered some of the perks of using Drupal for your enterprise and how Acquia can help you enhance those benefits, but choosing and implementing Drupal involves considerations that will always be specific to your use cases. In short, what are you looking for? 

Omnichannel content creation and publishing: Large enterprises have hefty content needs and have to deploy content wherever customers are looking for it. It’s important to get an idea of the scale at which you need your solution to handle content creation, editing, management, and publishing. Where is the content going? How often do you need to build new content? What are your content maintenance requirements? The Metro Transit Authority (MTA) knows what we mean and used Drupal to deploy content to more than 1,800 signs in 400 stations. 

Hosting: After better understanding your own content management needs, make sure your tech of choice is equipped to address them. Acquia’s fully managed Drupal hosting takes the cake here, leaving your team more time to craft head-turning digital experiences rather than fussing over Drupal’s technical foundation. In fact, it’s so technically solid that international beer corporation Molson Coors stands on the shoulders of Drupal hosted by yours truly! 

Integrations: What enterprise out there needs at least a few different technologies to play nicely with each other? A fair number. Luckily, Drupal is open and composable, so you don’t have to worry about different pieces of your tech stack butting heads. With 50,000+ integrations, it’s no surprise that 1 in 8 enterprise websites run on Drupal.

Support: When running an enterprise, having speedy, effective technical and community support is crucial to making sure your solution is well taken care of. With Acquia on your side, along with a developer community of 10,000+ active members contributing continually to Drupal’s improvement, your enterprise is in many good hands.

Drupal can do all of the above and more. Plus, when you’ve got Acquia with you, you’re working with the ultimate Drupal ally. Acquia specializes in open digital experiences and enables the world’s most ambitious brands to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter.

Our co-founder and CTO, Dries Buytaert, created Drupal and continues to serve as its project lead through the Drupal Association. With Drupal a core part of Acquia’s DNA, we have unique insight into the inner workings of the technology that powers the digital experiences of many of the world’s most recognizable brands. Plus, it helps that Acquia is the number one Drupal contributor in the world. That expertise means we can help you extract the most from Drupal for your enterprise. 

Getting started

With Drupal, your enterprise can join some of the world’s elite businesses. Interested in seeing exactly what Drupal can do for your enterprise? We’d be happy to show you. Check out our Drupal overview page to learn more about how it can help your organization stand out from the crowd. Or, if you want to dive in, get in touch, and we’ll demonstrate how Acquia and Drupal make digital experience magic together.