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.
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.