Happy New Year from all of us at Adaptive! In our first insights post of 2023, we’re looking ahead to what the coming months look like for us here at Adaptive and in the wider world of Drupal.
2023 - the year of Cyber Security
The volume of cyber security attacks continues to rise and the statistics are staggering. Cyberattacks in the first half of 2022 rose by 42% compared to 2021(i) and expectations are that the rate will only continue to increase as we head into 2023.
It's easy to think "no one would bother to target our business/organisation" but the reality is that most cyberattacks are completely untargeted, instead preying on any opportunities to find potential exploits, regardless of an organisation's size, sector or other factors.
That's why one of Adaptive's key focuses for the coming months will be in providing additional guidance, tools and services to all of our clients to aid them in further securing their websites and other digital platforms.
We already offer a range of cyber security tools for Drupal and we are working on adding to the armoury in Q1 and Q2 of this year. We'll be in touch with all our clients to update them as these services roll out but feel free to contact us for any information in advance.
Growing our hosting partnership with Pantheon
As we announced in November, Adaptive is now a Diamond partner of the fantastic hosting and WebOps platform, Pantheon.
We have partnered with Pantheon for the past couple of years to deliver our Managed Hosting Service for Drupal and have already successfully migrated many of our clients to the platform.
These sites have seen a wealth of benefits as a result, including added layers of security, increased performance and speed of their website and more efficient deployments of new features through the pipeline from development and testing to live.
We look forward to working with Pantheon to continue developing our managed hosting offering to clients and to extend our reach in this area during 2023.
The push to Drupal 10
The latest major version of Drupal - Drupal 10 - launched in December, bringing a number of enhancements including new content authoring and site admin improvements. The new version also ensures that the technical backbone of the platform remains in line with the latest, secure versions of related technical architecture such as PHP versions and the Symfony framework.
Drupal 10 is a natural progression from Drupal 9 and is designed to be upgradeable from Drupal 9 without too many issues or complications. Drupal 9 remains fully supported until later in the year but we'll be working with all our Drupal 9 clients in the coming months to plan and deliver a smooth upgrade to the latest Drupal 10 version.
2023 also sees Drupal 7's End-of-Life (EOL) date due to be reached in November. We’re already working with several clients on rebuilding their Drupal 7 sites into the latest Drupal versions, with several additional projects due to start in the Spring.
If your website is still on an older version of Drupal, you can read our quick guide to what’s involved in moving to D9. Whether you’re an existing client or not, we’re always happy to offer best-advice on what to do with your older Drupal site, so please get in touch if we can help.
Development projects
As well as the various site rebuild projects that we currently have underway, we also have several other projects that we're excited to see come to fruition during 2023.
One such project is a significant development that we've been working on for Anglian Water Parks, which will deliver a superb new online platform for visitors to their parks who are looking to book accommodation and activities online.
We've worked closely with the Anglian team on the project throughout much of 2022 and are looking forward to seeing the first phase of the project going live during Q1 of this year.
Delivering Drupal support and continuous development
In addition to everything else we currently have going on here at Adaptive, we still remain very proud of our original core service - Drupal Support and Continuous Development.
Taking on existing Drupal websites built elsewhere and supporting and enhancing them ongoing is the central service on which Adaptive has been built and we continue to offer high levels of service in this area to all of our existing clients.
We're working with our existing clients to formulate their plans for 2023 and we'll also be picking back up on pre-Christmas discussions with several potential new clients who we also hope to be working with in the coming months.
We believe that Adaptive remains one of the few Drupal-dedicated agencies in the UK that give equal priority and resources to delivering ongoing support for existing websites, in addition to the larger new projects we also work on.
As a result, we’ve gained numerous clients over the years who were in need of enhanced levels of support for their websites and wanted to feel like they were a priority, rather than their requests just being “fitted in” by their previous supplier as and when time allowed around their larger, higher-priority new build projects.
Our recently relaunched Support Essentials service delivers all the core support and maintenance you need for your website whilst our continuous development plans for Drupal continue to offer regular ongoing development for your website, ensuring it continues to evolve and deliver for your audience.
Find out more about how we could support your business or organisation by contacting us to discuss your requirements.
So here’s to 2023…
We’re very excited about the new opportunities and challenges that lie ahead this year and are looking forward to getting our teeth into delivering more great projects and solutions for our clients throughout the next 12 months. So here’s to 2023 – may it be a positive and successful year for all!
(i) Source: Forbes, October 2022