A Legacy Platform Carrying Obligations It Couldn't Meet
An Australian critical infrastructure operator runs a public-facing Sitecore platform that customers depend on for outage information, safety guidance, and service updates. This isn’t a marketing site. When there’s a service outage or a safety event, customers come to this platform first. The obligation to keep it available, secure, and current isn’t aspirational, it’s regulatory.
The site was running on Sitecore XP 8.x, hosted in the customer’s own Azure tenant on government-discounted commercial terms. The hosting model worked. The platform underneath did not.
A Stack of Obligations the Team Couldn’t Fully Discharge
Before Dataweavers, the day-to-day reality of running the platform was defined by what it couldn’t do. Sitecore 8.x had reached end of life, leaving the team with no realistic upgrade path and no vendor support, just best-effort patching against a clock that had already run out.
The security exposure was the harder problem. As a regulated critical infrastructure operator, the organization was expected to demonstrate a platform posture that matched its regulatory standing. The legacy environment couldn’t credibly do that. Controls were limited, monitoring was incomplete, and there was no WAF layer in front of the customer-facing sites.
Availability sat on implicit best effort. There was no SLA the team could point to, no formal commitment on uptime or failover, and no documented DR posture. For a platform carrying public safety and outage communications, that gap was hard to defend.
Corporate Communications felt the weight of it differently. Routine content changes, campaign updates, outage notices, safety guidance, routed through IT and engineering rather than being managed directly by the team responsible for them. Every update was slower than it needed to be, and during time-sensitive moments like network outages, that friction had real consequences.
Meanwhile, the digital roadmap had effectively stalled. The modern Sitecore capabilities the team needed to build toward their future-state digital strategy weren’t available on the legacy version. The platform wasn’t just a liability, it was actively setting the ceiling on what was possible.
"Dataweavers are on our top tier of vendors to work with... You are ahead of us every time, know things before we do and make sure that we keep moving in the right direction. Without the inertia that Dataweavers injects we’d be at a standstill and end up losing ground."
The Shift: Same Tenant, Different Platform
The operator moved its Sitecore platform onto Dataweavers. The deployment stayed inside the customer’s own Azure tenant, preserving the government-discounted commercial terms already in place. What changed was everything underneath: the Sitecore version, the security architecture, the availability posture, and the support model.
The upgrade off Sitecore 8.x was delivered as part of the engagement, not scoped as a separate project, not billed as a one-off. Security architecture aligned to critical infrastructure obligations was put in place, with hardened controls, proactive monitoring, and Cloudflare WAF and DDoS protection layered in front of the customer’s sites. Availability moved from best-effort to a 99.9% SLA with 24×7 support. And future Sitecore upgrades were included in the ongoing service, removing the cycle of capitalizing version upgrades as discrete projects.
What Changed in Practice
The end-of-life clock is gone. Sitecore is current and supported, and future upgrades will be handled as part of the service rather than deferred until they become urgent. The security posture now matches the operator’s regulatory standing, something the team can demonstrate, not just assert.
Availability is backed. The team can point at a 99.9% SLA and explain precisely how it’s being held to. That’s a different conversation with stakeholders than “we’re doing our best.”
Corporate Communications can move at its own pace again. Modern Sitecore authoring tools are available, the dependency on IT for routine content work has been reduced, and the team has regained the ability to respond quickly during the moments that matter most - outages, safety events, service updates.
Tested on a Public Holiday
The value of having a DXP platform operations provider with skin in the game was demonstrated concretely on Good Friday. The public outages page, one of the most critical pages on the platform, started returning a 500-error following a third-party deployment that went wrong. The customer’s usual digital agency was unavailable. Their internal team was offline.
Dataweavers triaged the issue, identified the cause, rolled back the bad release, and restored the page within an hour. No escalation required. No waiting until the next business day. The page that customers depend on during network outages was back up before the problem had time to compound.
That incident is a useful illustration of what a DXP platform operations provider's obligation actually means in practice. The SLA isn’t just a number on a contract; it’s the thing that determines whether someone picks up the phone on a public holiday.
Looking Ahead
With the platform on stable, supported, SLA-backed footing, the operator has shifted from defending the platform to investing in it. Corporate Communications is moving its digital roadmap forward with modern Sitecore capability behind it. The broader organization has the headspace to plan future-state work without the duress of an end-of-life clock — and with confidence that the platform beneath them will meet the obligations the business carries.
The Business Impact:
- End-of-life Sitecore 8.x replaced with current, supported version, future upgrades included in the service
- Critical infrastructure security obligations met at the platform layer (hardened controls, monitoring, Cloudflare WAF)
- 99.9% availability SLA and 24×7 support replaced unbacked best-effort uptime
- Incident triaged and resolved within one hour on a public holiday, with no agency support available
- Corporate Communications unblocked from IT dependency for routine content and campaign work
- Government-discounted Azure commercial terms preserved inside the customer’s own tenant
