Symantec Enlists Tag1 for Web Security for Its Cybersecurity Products and an Innovative Decoupled Architecture for Integrations

Originally founded in 1982, Symantec, gained worldwide prominence for its software solutions in word processing and project management. In the early 1990s, Symantec entered the cybersecurity market with its antivirus solutions, which are found on computers around the globe. With various products focused on cybersecurity and its 2016 acquisition of LifeLock, Symantec has cemented its industry-leading role.

With digital transformation at the top of mind, Symantec has a variety of brand websites that must live up to the same stringent standards that customers and enterprises expect from all of Symantec’s products and services. With Drupal, Symantec can integrate with various other web technologies and platforms to satisfy business goals.

Situation: A New Site and a Lasting Partnership

For over a decade, Symantec and BKJ Digital have consolidated a strong partnership, supporting the Symantec Connect and Symantec Blogs websites, among other projects. When BKJ Digital was brought into the fold to build the first version of Symantec Connect, a Drupal site, they contacted Tag1 for its Technical Architecture and Leadership to ensure the implementation would not fail. Tag1 collaborated with BKJ Digital to share its combined decades of infrastructure, security, and Drupal CMS expertise.

Delivering a robust, secure, and scalable digital experience on a tight timeline is challenging for the best teams to deliver. The new requirements from Symantec touched every persona in the organization, including content editors who wanted to see their changes reflected live immediately, developers who required modern development workflows using continuous integration tooling, and Symantec’s customers, who expect a robust and highly secure range of web presences without even the smallest risk.

Challenge: New Expectations for Infrastructure, Deployment, Integrations, and Performance

While Symantec already had a high degree of trust in Drupal, the accelerating changes in the infrastructure, CMS architecture, deployment, and performance landscapes were sufficient to present substantial challenges for the Tag1 and BKJ Digital teams. Symantec required an architecture that would facilitate the publication of instant updates without any detriment to performance, agile development processes with full continuous integration and continuous deployment workflow, and migration of over a decade of technical debt without breaking the budget.

Because of Symantec’s stature as a large company with many departments, each having its own requirements, integration was a key component of the project. Some departments strongly preferred or committed to other CMS providers, such as Adobe Experience Manager.Despite the many services used across the organization, end users and content editors must view the Symantec web experience as seamless, frictionless, and fast. Leveraging a unified front-end presentation layer would allow the disparate CMS and systems back end to synchronize into a single application, delivering on that desired experience. 

Solution: Industry-Leading Expertise in Infrastructure and Scalability

With many years as an integral part of the architectural decision-making and development of the Drupal platform, Tag1 was the obvious choice for Symantec and BKJ Digital to consult on some of the most intractable challenges of the project. Tag1 Consulting benefits from experts with a wide range of expertise beyond Drupal, including DevOps best practices, robust infrastructure, modern web development, and cutting-edge web security. In fact, many Drupal organizations and community members rely on Tag1’s guidance, as they play a role in the direction of the framework of Drupal itself.

Thanks to Symantec’s decade-long partnership with Tag1’s Technical Architecture and Leadership, the leading cybersecurity provider was able to transform its approach to building and delivering its web applications with the latest best practices and development approaches. With the solutions recommended by Tag1 for the most difficult challenges Symantec faced, the client could not only leverage automation for more of its process but also get much more work done faster. Tag1’s unparalleled expertise provides what enterprises need to manage strategic shifts toward automation, modern workflows, and approaches that accelerate Symantec’s progress toward its vision along multiple dimensions.

Infrastructure for Many Users and Many Edits

At BKJ Digital’s request, Tag1 led and architected the buildout of Symantec’s new and improved infrastructure to support the Symantec Connect site, which is a forum-like website with a large number of concurrent authenticated users who all need to create, view, and edit dynamic content with minimal latency. Tag1 adhered closely to Symantec’s requirements for performance, redundancy, and multi-region failover on the first version of the new hosting infrastructure, ultimately choosing Rackspace as a preferred host.

The first iteration of the Symantec Connect infrastructure was installed in primary servers in Dallas, TX, with failover available in the Mid-Atlantic. Tag1 then paired the infrastructure with a robust content delivery network (CDN) through Akamai, routing traffic to the proper location based on application performance and limiting latency perceived by end users. Since that time, Tag1 has worked closely with Symantec’s other partners to migrate its entire infrastructure twice more to its current iteration.

An Innovative Decoupled Architecture with React

BKJ Digital approached Tag1 requesting a creative migration solution as an alternative to the exorbitantly expensive and time-consuming migrations typical in the Drupal market at the time. Tag1 understood this meant migrating Symantec Connect’s Drupal 6 codebase while preparing for the site’s long-term sustainability and continued growth. Although a full migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 was considered, the extreme cost of porting all site features and content on a single timeline was prohibitively disruptive. Instead, Tag1 proposed a novel solution at the time: a decoupled architecture with a React front end to straddle Drupal versions and instances, as well as other CMSs such as Adobe Experience Manager. This solution would allow Symantec to continue running legacy systems as the migration proceeded.

Running two CMS instances simultaneously proved to be the most affordable solution and immediately impacted delivering on business needs. Using React to present the content for both sites made it possible to port functionality over feature by feature, maintaining critical data without interruption. Through their partnership, BKJ Digital proceeded with the migration while Tag1, a Drupal Long-Term Support (LTS) vendor, supported the Drupal 6 version. Fortunately, this saved Symantec from significant development expenses, site downtime, and other complications that inevitably arise in migration across two Drupal versions.

Integrating Seamlessly with Other CMSs and Services

As technologies from various vendors become more affordable and more easily implemented, selecting the correct foundational software that can support the modifications that stakeholders wish to see is essential. While this project focused on the Symantec Connect website, Symantec also operates many other web properties that leverage other CMSs, such as Adobe Experience Manager. Fortunately, with Tag1’s experience synthesizing data from multiple discrete systems into Drupal, paired with Drupal’s own robustness for this use case, integration was painless.

Thanks to Drupal’s API-first orientation in recent years and its ability to serve as a centralized content repository in a variety of configurations, Tag1 was able to import certain data and other content to Adobe Experience Manager, pairing it and Drupal seamlessly in the process so that editors can utilize a single unified administrative interface in Drupal. This ensured stakeholders' satisfaction while providing the argument to Symantec’s team that their investment in AEM and other supporting technologies could continue unabated on a unified foundation of content in Drupal. It also reduced technical debt, shaved crucial time from the development process for Symantec’s partners, and saved Symantec significant money.

Agile Development that Scales to New Dynamics and Partnerships

In large enterprises, it is often the case that enforcing best practices and innovating quickly are mutually exclusive endeavors. Decision-makers often have the choice of one or the other, seldom both.

Supported by Tag1’s deep technical understanding of BKJ Digital’s development workflow and Symantec’s internal requirements, Tag1’s Technical Architecture and Leadership was able t to lead and implement a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) process that ensured full quality control on releases and pushed deployments live to production, as often as every few minutes. For Symantec’s developers, this meant go-live durations for new features were dramatically reduced, while the production environment never went stale. The implementation became substantially more efficient with most of the CI/CD process automated. As a result, Symantec could focus on delivering business value rather than surmounting multiple obstacles in the form of DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.

Infrastructure as Code and Robust Developer Tooling

At scale, redundancy significantly helps avoid potentially disastrous downtime. Many large enterprise sites also leverage technologies to ensure that sites return online as soon as possible after a server failure. As systems administrators and site reliability engineers know, keeping resources constantly spinning to handle this transition is optimal, but it is often costly.

Tag1’s Technical Architecture and Leadership conceived a just-in-time server configuration scheme allowing maximum uptime. When a server comes under load, or a resource goes down, a system architected by Tag1 allows Symantec and BKJ Digital to configure new servers immediately. This improved transition process facilitates a significantly reduced total cost of ownership, all while preserving the ability to spin up and transition to newly provisioned backup resources in mere minutes.

Effective server configuration and infrastructural innovations are only a part of the puzzle. From a developer’s perspective, managing and juggling infrastructure is often a tedious process in which developers must replicate changes across hardware configurations and deploy them during their off hours. Teams face lower efficiencies as they continue improving and introducing new issues rather than focusing on new additive features. Thanks to implementing Symantec’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC), developers maintaining the Symantec Connect website commit changes back to infrastructure and deploy them rapidly while ensuring that all other developers’ local environments are up-to-date. By ensuring consistency across all developer environments and running configuration through the CI/CD process, Symantec can reduce damaging regressions and focus on more valuable and mission-critical priorities.

Results: Automation and Innovation Secured by Symantec

Owing to the successful partnership between Tag1’s Technical Architecture and Leadership and BKJ Digital, the Symantec Connect project is a compelling example of how difficult and complex requirements can be satisfied with innovative solutions and technical know-how. The end result was a cutting-edge platform architecture that reduced costs, allowing for rapid, incremental releases using an automated CI/CD workflow and Infrastructure as Code while providing ongoing stability for legacy systems.

Under Tag1’s technical leadership, Symantec’s teams can publish instantaneous updates across many websites, testing and deploying securely across Drupal versions while maintaining integrations with other CMSs and services. This allows them to focus on new features and products to capture end users’ mindshare instead of worrying about downtime, technical debt, and maintenance.

This case study is based on the DrupalCon presentation, “From Early Drupal Adoption to the Latest Drupal Innovations” which you can watch online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1rQSsO_oDI