Drupal’s popularity as a comprehensive, flexible, and powerful Content Management System (CMS) spans a wide spectrum of businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies around the world. In fact, many of its top contributors are key users of the platform. The product has been around for almost 25 years, and the use cases for this CMS show no signs of slowing. Whether it is a large business in the eCommerce, finance, entertainment, or other industry, the strengths of Drupal often shine brightest when helping to power a big operation.

1. Highly Scalable Infrastructure

One of Drupal’s core capabilities and what often impresses large businesses and organisations is scalability. Large enterprises need digital solutions that can grow as their operations and needs increase. Drupal can support this growth with a core infrastructure that is built to scale.

Whether this involves supporting spikes in page views and content traffic, handling larger or distributed content libraries, or simply having capacity for more business functions, Drupal can provide the performance needed.

Drupal was created with speed in mind, so Drupal architecture allows for performance optimisations such as:

– Built-in caching mechanisms

– Load balancing and distribution

– Splitting the front and back ends (a so-called “headless CMS” configuration)

All of this means that you can count on the robustness of Drupal when developing a large-scale website that handles high traffic volumes or if you anticipate your site growing to meet increasing business needs.

The websites for the Australian Government, NASA, National Geographic, and Oxford University are all examples of businesses using Drupal for enterprise to scale to enterprise-level traffic and content requirements.

2. Robust Security Measures

Security is another aspect of large business operations that often takes Drupal to the next level. From finance or medical websites to government or education institutions, the security and privacy of user data are of utmost importance.

Drupal is widely recognised as one of the most secure platforms for a website or web application. The platform has a strong security team and an active community of over 30,000 users contributing to the maintenance and constant updating of the platform.

Enterprise-grade permissions for roles, users, and groups, combined with encryption and advanced authentication, give Drupal the capability to customise granular access levels to manage and protect sensitive information.

All of this means that Drupal can help prevent common security issues like SQL injection and brute force attacks, as well as protect against vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF).

With security compliance such as GDPR, HIPAA, and WCAG baked into Drupal, the open source CMS helps business owners meet the security and privacy requirements of the users and markets they serve.

3. Deep Customisability and Extensions

While Drupal has many out of the box (OOTB) or ready-made features, its biggest advantage for many large businesses and institutions is the ability to build custom functionalities and logic to power unique use cases.

Customisability of Drupal allows your development agency to modify or completely change almost every aspect of the system to align with the needs and goals of the business or organisation.

With over 40,000 contributed modules that add all kinds of functionality to your site and platform, as well as the ability to create fully custom modules, Drupal is flexible and adaptive enough to help you accommodate unique or complex use cases.

Drupal’s architecture allows for integrations with major software applications, platforms, and third-party APIs to meet the needs of a variety of enterprise organisations and industries. For example, these include integrations with major SaaS products for many businesses including:

– Microsoft Dynamics

– Salesforce

– SAP

Using these integrations, Drupal helps to improve coordination between teams, align various technology applications, and unlock the potential of a tech stack with Drupal as a common denominator.

A strong Drupal development agency can also assist in choosing an approach for building custom integrations to maximise value for the business by using middleware, APIs, and so on.

4. Multisite and Multilingual Support

Multilingualism and managing multiple brands, divisions, locations, or sites within one company are often a part of larger businesses. Having to support this level of complexity using different products or platforms is inefficient and time consuming.

Drupal comes with built in multisite functionality that lets you have a single Drupal codebase that hosts control multiple separate websites.

Complementing Drupal’s multisite support are multilingual tools that enable you to serve customers in more than 100 languages with ease. This means that instead of having to maintain multiple Drupal instances for different languages, departments, divisions, or brands, you can host localised content and experiences with full management capabilities for each.

5. Drive Content-First Digital Experiences

Content is central to how organisations engage their customers, users, and markets. That is why Drupal is referred to as a content-first CMS.

Drupal provides features and an architecture that let you model content entities in all of their complexities and interdependencies, and design sophisticated and intuitive editorial experiences to support the workflows around it.

Drupal also recognises that content should be served across all channels and platforms. With built-in support for creating RESTful APIs and headless or decoupled website architecture, Drupal CMS makes it simple to take your content to where users and customers are.

6. Long-Term Community Support and Resources

Drupal is open source and supported by an active worldwide community, as well as a strong and experienced organisation in Acquia.

The community provides great support for open-source Drupal use cases as well as free access to great resources, contributed projects, modules, and so on.

Acquia offers enterprise-level hosting and support, extended security, and additional tools and resources that cover enterprise-grade use cases and advanced customisability needs.

Drupal’s regular updates, long-term support (LTS) approach and product roadmaps provide the support large enterprises need for long-term viability and growth.

7. Cost-Effective Solutions

Drupal has a reputation for being an expensive and developer-heavy platform. While this might be the case for out-of-the-box Drupal solutions for small and medium enterprises, this is not the case if you are building a custom CMS for your business with Drupal.

Drupal can be an extremely cost-effective solution over time as an open-source platform with no fees or licensing costs associated with it. Its built-in functionalities and design reduce or eliminate the need for many third-party add-ons that could be very expensive for larger enterprises.

Drupal is capable of spanning a wide range of business needs, so the customisability allows it to consolidate functions like:

– User-facing websites

– B2B / B2C web stores

– Internal employee portals

– Knowledge bases or documentation centres

– Content libraries or libraries

– Intranets

This flexibility can reduce complexity as well as reduce costs associated with supporting different platforms and technology stacks.

Drupal for Enterprises: Wrap Up

Drupal CMS has several characteristics and features that make it a great fit for large-scale businesses and organisations. Drupal provides the foundational tech that has helped businesses scale massively with their operations, handle a wide range of tasks, secure data and privacy of users, and customise and control websites and platforms to provide meaningful experiences.

Its track record with a wide range of large scale websites and businesses, along with a highly active and committed open-source community, and the backing of an experienced company in Acquia also give Drupal strong enterprise support.

All of these reasons and others are why a Drupal website is a great CMS to meet and exceed enterprise digital business goals.

For large enterprises that need to support massive scale operations, complex and unique business needs, and a high standard of security, a customised Drupal can be an excellent solution. Drupal development agencies like Codify help to create highly custom solutions for businesses that need the flexibility, reliability, and support of a well-known CMS.

Codify, as one of Australia’s leading Drupal web development companies, has a strong team of Drupal developers and experts with a successful track record in Drupal web development. As a Drupal development agency, we bring strategic and technical insights to working with our clients. Our experience means that we have a deep knowledge of the nuances and pain points of Drupal web development for Drupal businesses.

With a good development partner that can guide you in terms of both the technical and business decisions when it comes to your Drupal strategy, you can unlock the full potential of Drupal for your large-scale business.