interview

Q&A with Acquia’s Chief Marketing Officer

Ally DelGuidice-Bove — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 17:00:44 +0000

Q&A with Acquia’s Chief Marketing Officer

This post is a part of our Marketer's Guide to Drupal 8 series. We created this guide to walk you through considerations for choosing an open source CMS, plus case studies and CMO advice to bring your site to the next level.

Lynne Capozzi is the Chief Marketing Officer for Acquia, the organization behind the success of some of the world’s leading Drupal-based brands, including Princess Cruises, Warner Music Group, Pegasystems, and Stanford University. Thousands of brands are using Acquia’s solutions for digital experience management.

As Acquia’s chief marketing officer, Lynne oversees all global marketing functions including digital marketing, demand generation, operations, regional and field marketing, customer and partner marketing, events, vertical strategy, analyst relations, content and corporate communications.

Lynne is one of Acquia’s boomerang stories, first serving as Acquia CMO in 2009. Lynne left Acquia in 2011 to pursue her nonprofit work full-time. She returned to Acquia in late 2016 to lead the marketing organization into its next stage of growth.

We sat down with Lynne to hear how her team drove impressive results — a 50% improvement in conversion rate! — and led the rebranding and re-platforming of Acquia.com on Drupal 8.

Mediacurrent Interview with Lynne Capozzi

Mediacurrent: What does “digital transformation” mean for you at Acquia?

LC: I think there are many ways to answer this question. For me, digital transformation is the intersection between business processes and digital technology. It’s continually building and optimizing for a full 360-view of a customer, -- the journey from prospect to customer and maintaining that relationship at every touchpoint along the way for each individual customer.

Mediacurrent: What are your top 3 initiatives/goals right now in general and for your website?

LC: In general, a couple of my top initiatives right now are:

We are going through putting the final touches on our redesign and refreshing our brand for Acquia. It’s a new look and feel for us which is more contemporary. I am super excited about it - our brand is ever evolving. We are a 10-year-old company, and the goal is to enhance the brand. We have been calling it a brand evolution.

Our in-person customer conference Acquia Engage is the biggest conference we do for the year. We use our site to drive attendance and registrations for the event.

Last November, we went through a D7 to D8 re-platforming of our site. We are about eight months into that process, and it’s going extremely well. We are now in the process of adding new Acquia videos and new product demonstrations directly onto the site. One of the things I want to do is to have more self-service directly from the site - so someone can come to the site and get more of a feel of what is Acquia, what do we do, and they are more prone to do that and absorb that information through video.

Mediacurrent: Do you think re-platforming to Drupal 8 was the smart decision for Acquia?

LC: Yes, absolutely. Replatforming to Drupal 8 was the best decision we ever made.

Mediacurrent: What are 2 current challenges are you trying to solve for?

LC: I think we have the same challenge as every other marketing team. Thinking of the marketing funnel and conversion of prospect through the funnel. How to improve funnel conversion is always top of mind for me.

One of the things that is directly related to that is - how do we feed the right content to our prospects at various phases of the funnel. So for instance, for someone who has shown interest in us, raised their hand and come to our site - it’s up to us to determine the best ways to put out content and make sure to feed the right content through the funnel at the right time.

We are looking at other non-touch ways such as enhancing chat through the site. We are also exploring ways to have those prospects continuously go through the funnel and work on conversion through the funnel at each stage.

Mediacurrent: Building off that thought, I know Mediacurrent has become an Acquia Journey and Lift partner. And I was wondering, do you think Journey & Lift will help you enhance that process?

LC: Absolutely. We have already seen that Acquia Lift has enhanced our process. We implemented Acquia Lift when we re-platformed from Drupal 7 to D8 and we have already seen a 50% conversion rate improvement - so we already know by putting personalization on the site, it helps us with conversions. The pages that have Lift convert a lot better than those that do not and it’s a more personalized experienced for someone coming in.

And the Journey mapping is beneficial as well. It ties back to the importance of having a 360 view of the customer and Journey brings it all together.

Mediacurrent: How are you using Drupal 8 to reach those goals?

LC: Drupal 8 provides easier content authoring and content creation. The fact that my team can now author content more easily, and have a more efficient workflow process for content allows us to tie back to have funnel conversions at the right stage. So the content authoring, creation and workflow improvements in Drupal 8 have helped us a lot.

We are also expanding our global reach so translation for us has become a bigger part of our strategy. Out of the box Drupal 8 Core has multilingual capabilities and as we go to expand globally and translate our sites, the core capabilities make it easier for us to expand.

Mediacurrent: What was your biggest influence in moving to Drupal 8?

LC: We always want to be on the forefront and be on the latest and greatest and be able to use that technology. I wanted to be a showcase for our customers on what is possible for Drupal 8 - that was one of the biggest reasons. I wanted to be able to show that you can have a sexy site that has all the authoring and content management advantages of Drupal 8.

We strive to live the life of our customers and the best way to do that is to be practitioners ourselves. My team was anxious for the user interface enhancements it provided, and they also told me they were looking forward to an increase in speed.

Mediacurrent: Has this been your first experience with Drupal or have you worked with previous versions of Drupal in the past?

LC: I will tell you that I was here in Acquia in 2009 and at that point, we were using D6. The changes from D6 to D8, are just amazing.

Mediacurrent: What was the experience like upgrading from D7 - D8?

LC: We learned a lot. We did a complete redesign from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and it involved a lot of content restructuring. It was a massive undertaking just from the amount of content we had.

First, we took an analyze, choose, and purge approach to our content. We looked at all the data from Google Analytics and other tools in order to make better decisions on the content that would really capture our audience’s attention.

We really took a strategic approach and used it as an opportunity to redefine our content strategy. We migrated and rearranged the content to better appeal to our customers rather than using our site for an internal sales tool. When you come to our site now, it’s really an experience. That’s what we were going for.

It went well from my perspective because we were able to stay on budget, and keep to the launch timeline, and meet our initial goals in order to become a showcase for our customers.

Mediacurrent: Since launching on Drupal 8 have you noticed an increase in website conversions? What would you attribute to that success (or lack of success)?

LC: We do have a couple of metrics.

As I mentioned our overall our conversion rates have increased by 50%. When I first wrote the brief to re-platform, this was my biggest goal and I’m proud to say we accomplished what we set out to do.

Our overall site traffic is down, which was to be expected because we pruned the content. We have more relevant content, it’s updated, the quality is better, the end user experience is better, and that is what it’s all about.

The other thing that we saw was because we used personalization, we saw an increase in conversions with Acquia Lift. For instance, now, we have personalized industry case studies.

Mediacurrent: What's your involvement in the procurement process of new technology for Acquia?

LC: I own it. I own the budget for technology products that impact the site and our martech stack. My team and I decide on what technologies we are going to purchase.

Mediacurrent: Is it usually your team coming to you? Or you going to your team with technology?

LC: It’s definitely both. 75% it is my team coming to me and 25% me going to my team.

Mediacurrent: What advice would you give other CMO’s/VP’s/Director’s who are hesitant to move to Drupal 8?

LC: I would say don’t hesitate. My VP of Digital, Eric Williamson, he always describes our move to Drupal 8 as redesigning our sun or as our north star to aim for. For us, our site is our biggest single source of top of funnel leads for the company. There is an enormous pressure that comes with that and to do it with as few mistakes as possible. So this is what we did and the advice I give to people:

Write a brief. My team did this in the beginning and it became our guiding light in what we wanted to accomplish. And in times when we wanted to add something, we came back to the brief to ask “Does it meet our strategic goals?” - is it what we laid out in the beginning and “Does it fit in our MVP?” or can it be pushed to later?
I wrote an investment case internally within the company for the execs. I put in there that my biggest goal was around conversions. I provided them a template which showed if we make this investment to re-platform from D7 to D8, what would our bottom line improvement be based on these new conversion rates. It made it easy for the exec team to look and say “yes, it is a worthwhile investment.” So that investment case was key and it helped me with the full C-suite.
Don’t go at it alone. We tapped into our partner network and got a great partner to work with us around it. That partner resource, tagged with our internal resource team and the teamwork was great. We were able to come together and meet our objectives.
Decide on a Digital Asset Management System from the outset. The other thing in terms of advice that we did not do but wish we had - we did not have a Digital Asset Management (DAM) product. Looking in the rearview mirror, it would have been easier to install that in the beginning prior to migrating. If I was to do this again, I would have installed the damn DAM first.

Mediacurrent: What online sources do you use for thought leadership?

LC: I use a lot! Some online sources as my “go to’s” are:

SiriusDecisions, a marketing analytics company
MarTech
CMSWire, of course!
Whitepapers and webinars where I see customers and even non-Acquia customers -describe what they did for their digital transformation -- the how, why, and what they got in return from that. That’s the biggest source for me.
Analyst community - Gartner, Forrester, etc.

Mediacurrent: What conferences are you attending, if any, this year?

LC: We have Acquia Engage coming up in November! -- Mediacurrent is sponsoring!

I am also leading a panel discussion at Martech here in Boston at the beginning of October. I will be sitting with a few of our customers, Pegasystems and The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to talk about the challenges they are facing in digital, and how they are partnering with Acquia to drive their own digital transformation.

Ally DelGuidice-Bove Mon, 08/20/2018 - 13:00

Services

Digital Strategy

Q&A: Healthcare Marketing with Drupal 8

Mediacurrent Team — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 13:09:43 +0000

Q&A: Healthcare Marketing with Drupal 8

Meet Alan

Alan Onnen is the Associate Director of Marketing for the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Recognized as #1 in rehabilitation for 27 years in a row. AbilityLab introduces its revolutionary care through 5 Innovation Centers -- state-of-the-art hospital facilities and equipment for exceptional patient care provided by the best medical and nursing support.

With 15 years of experience in the marketing industry, the past 5 being with SRA and being a part of the team that helped adopt Drupal, Onnen has seen firsthand how Drupal 8 powers digital strategy.

What does “digital transformation” mean for you?

Digital transformation means constant evolution. There’s no single transformation; it’s a constant state of change, staying on top of trends at once. As a digital marketer, you need to know a bit about everything, UI, UX, nerdy stuff, best practices, changes in the digital environment, what people expect from websites in your vertical, etc. Some people think transformation is a binary term - something new - but it's not.

How does open source fit into the equation?

Open source is something that’s not new but it’s getting so mainstream it's part of that digital transformation. It’s about adjusting to the new worlds where open source doesn't mean unsecured - it means that it’s open and honest. We had to get buy-in from stakeholders. They dismissed it at the beginning of the RFP because they thought you needed a Sitecore or an Adobe Experience Manager. It took a long time and a lot of agency people to show how safe it is to help make them believe that open source isn’t a dirty word.

What current challenges are you trying to solve?

It is a constant struggle to keep up with Google - making sure our content is optimized for search algorithms. Our overall challenge is to keep our content fresh, navigating innovative best practices for our website while keeping up with legal and social constructs.

How are you using Drupal 8 to solve those problems?

One of the big reasons we chose Drupal was because of its customization ability. Our knowledge base is spread across so many people so Drupal’s ability to customize the backend experience and offer the fields and plain English way we need to talk about things is really important. Even just the simple need for content creators to be able to edit things and be able to customize that experience.

Another big reason was the fact that its open source and the community surrounding Drupal. If you have an idea you can find someone who has half baked or full-baked into that particular module or idea to help give your devs a head start solution. With Drupal, you don’t have to start from scratch when you need something new to move the website forward. Chances are, someone has had a similar idea you can pull from.

Has this been your first experience with Drupal or have you worked with previous versions of Drupal in the past? What did Drupal 8 give you from a marketers/content editors' perspective?

I came to SRA on a proprietary healthcare based CMS. It was designed to serve mid to small hospital systems, and we didn’t have access to the backend part of the site before. SRA put out an RFP for a replatforming and redesign of our website. We talked to different agencies, and Drupal kept coming up - there were no licensing fees with open source. The spin up on Drupal is more robust than most paid CMS experiences. The cost point of view is having it be free and open was very appetizing and Drupal had other features that appealed to us.

Since launching on Drupal 8 have you noticed an increase in website conversions? What would you attribute to that success (or lack of success)? By use of marketing automation strategies? Because of easy integration?

Drupal can be leveraged any which way you want it to be. We take advantage of the extensive list of modules. We have seen nice conversions off the YAML module and the webform module. It’s true of the module philosophy to be able to build how you want them.

With Drupal, our web traffic has been up. We have 3 very different facets of our site - rehab measures database, research educational platform, home site - and Drupal can support them all very well. It’s a testament to Drupal - with a flexible CMS, reporting, user interfaces, and a back end that can be robust enough to bring things together in an organic and seamless way.

What are three factors you look at when evaluating an agency? Cost? Reputation? Their own web design? Logos they've sold?

With our RFP out, we began evaluating the superficial - books, examples, case studies, white papers, if their leadership had given talks and what they had talked about, the look and feel for brand consciousness, - exploring that space of ability. We didn’t want someone who was making cookie-cutter websites, and we didn’t want to stay looking just in the healthcare vertical. Our list was narrowed down to those whose work we respected and admired.

In the RFP, the CMS wasn’t a consideration. We didn’t tell people which platform you needed to be on. We asked for the cost, their preferred CMS, and why, and we never cared about where the agency was located. It’s important to know the people are the agency - communication is critical. For instance, in their responses to those RFP’s are there timelines? Are they realistic? Do they make sense? It’s easy to see how much effort they did.

No one else did research like you guys [Mediacurrent] did before they got there for a face to face meeting. Your team said “oh, well we’ve already talked to discharge managers, nurses, planners.” They went through example personas, guessing on journeys, patients - and they were smart with how they handled it and took the initiative that early in the process. That showed us a lot about them. It wasn’t a giant new business budget, and they didn’t ask for money up front.

In all, the RFP process was about 4 months.

What advice would you give other CMO’s/VP’s/Director’s who are hesitant to move to Drupal 8?

I would say it depends on what their hesitation is. You have to be committed to the build of your site. You need to be able to really understand your content creators, the users of your CMS, the scope of what they want to be doing, and understand what they could be doing on the front end. It’s important to know the ingredients - you can muck up Drupal and waste dev hours if you don’t know how the workflows to go and to know your taxonomy and pathing modules.

Drupal requires a Digital Marketer to have a vision for what they want it to be before they start developing - or else they risk having to go back and retrofit into their CMS environment that they could have efficiently put in the first time.

The journey of CMS and Drupal needs to be a thoughtful one.

______________________________________________________

We want to extend a big THANK YOU to Alan for participating in this interview. In the next part of the blog series, we will dig into the top reasons for Drupal 8 and why enterprise marketers choose Drupal.

Download the Marketer's Guide to Drupal

Mediacurrent Team Wed, 08/08/2018 - 09:09

Responding in Action to a Drupal Security Advisory

Mark Shropshire — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 12:29:48 +0000

Responding in Action to a Drupal Security Advisory

Security maintenance — and the ability to apply security updates quickly — is part and parcel to open source project success.

Updating is typically done as part of the normal software release cycle, however, there are times when a security advisory needs to be released ASAP. A strong incident response plan builds a first defense line to mitigate and patch vulnerabilities.

But what does a successful security response look like in action?

On the heels of a recent Drupal security update on August 1, 2018, Mediacurrent’s Senior Project Manager Christine Flynn had the same question. To find out, she interviewed our Open Source Security Lead, Mark “shrop” Shropshire, to get a layperson’s perspective on the security team’s approach.

An off-cycle Drupal security advisory dropped on August 1, 2018. What does that mean for folks who aren’t developers?

Flynn: I was watching the Slack channel as our team fixed sites, and I got some idea of what was happening. I’m not going to jiggle anybody’s elbows while they’re applying a security update, but I’m really curious now that the fixes are all in.

Shrop: The official Drupal Security Advisory came out late in the day after Symphony published their announcement in the morning. There was also one from Zend.

Flynn: I read all of those links while the team was applying the security update, but I feel like I didn’t totally understand the implications. I’d love to get a better picture from you of what they mean.

Shrop: You bet! I hope you can hear me, I’m at a coffee shop right now.

Flynn: Are you on their unsecured WiFi?

Shrop: Nope! I’m on a hotspot and on VPN. It’s funny, the more you know about security, the more it changes what you do. Other people think you’re paranoid. But you’re not! You just understand the realities.

Flynn: Ha! Why am I not surprised? All right, let’s dig in.

What was the security update for?

Shrop: Drupal Core was updated because there were some security releases for Symfony. We call those “upstream” in the biz, which means that Drupal depends on them, and they are actively worked on outside of Drupal. I understand the Symfony project worked closely with the Drupal Security Team to make sure Symfony and Drupal were both updated and ready to be announced publicly at the same time. Drupal version 8.5.6 pulls in the Symfony updates as part of the Drupal update process.

Flynn: Was that the only update?

Shrop: No, at the same time, there was also an update to Zend Framework, but that was only an issue for users who were making use of modules or sites that used Zend Feed or Daictoros. There is a core issue to update the related Zend libraries for those who require or need the updates.

If not updated, what could a malicious user do to a site?

Shrop: This is a hard one to answer this soon after the release of the security advisory. I’m going to do some checking to see if I can get more information on this for academic purposes, but the Drupal Security Team is not going to make any statements that could help someone attack a site. It is up to security teams and researchers to dig into the code and determine more about the risks involved.

Based on the Symfony project’s blog post, it appears that a specially crafted request could allow a user access to a URL they do not have access to, bypassing access control provided by web servers and caching mechanisms. That’s a fancy-pants way of saying that a website visitor could gain access to pages you don’t want them to see.

When will we know more?

Shrop: Within days - sometimes hours - we might start to see exploit methods posted on the Internet. Taking security seriously and responding quickly once a drupal.org security advisory is announced is a way to stay ahead of these concerns.

Mediacurrent doesn’t want to fearmonger, but it is better to be safe than sorry. That’s why I always push to update as soon as possible while weighing in on mitigating factors that may lessen the severity of the issue for a particular application. But I will keep digging. I’m curious!

If you had to tell a CEO or CFO the value that implementing this security update swiftly provided, what would you say? Let’s say this CEO does not have a strong background in technology or security.

Flynn: I could see an executive with a strong public safety or physical security background being pretty understanding of why you want to apply a security update for a potential vulnerability quickly, but what if it’s someone who doesn’t have that experience, and isn’t a technologist?

Shrop: Check out this link from Acquia about the security update. This helped me so much. They published this shortly after the PSA came out, and although they’ve updated the text since then, they said at the time, “It is advised that customers set aside time for a core upgrade immediately following.” When I read, “immediately,” I knew that we had to get the update out within hours. If I was asked to get on a call with the executives from any company, at that point, I am confident. If Acquia is saying it, we need to do it. That’s enough to stand on with anybody. I’m not saying that the Acquia team has more information, but they have a very robust security team. They always dig in quickly. They have to, to know if they can mitigate the issue by adding web application firewall rules.

Flynn: Firewall rules? How does that work?

Shrop: The last few core updates, Pantheon and Acquia put mitigations into their WAF - that’s Web Application Firewall. Pantheon confirmed the night of the security advisory release that they were blocking attempts on their platform, and Acquia did the same thing. So if someone tried to exploit a site that was hosted there before Drupal was updated, they were there, helping to prevent that site from being attacked successfully. It’s a great extra layer of protection. Now, me and Acquia and Pantheon will always still want to update Core on each site, because WAF-level mitigation might not catch everything. But I am super happy when I see it because there’s a good chance that it will catch anything that happens while a team is still implementing a security update.

Security is all risk assessment and mitigation. You want to layer defenses. And something like this, we are going to make sure we deal with this problem. That’s why Acquia, Pantheon, Platform.sh, and others in the community immediately add those extra mitigations to their firewalls. It’s to buy time so that people can get their updates in. That’s not where mitigation ends, but it helps.

What type of sites were affected by this? Does everyone use Symfony?

Flynn: When I first read about the upcoming security advisory, I saw that it affected “third-party libraries.” That made me think that some of our clients might not be affected because it would only affect certain modules. Can you tell me what types of sites were affected?

Shrop: Got a link for you, but basically, anything on Drupal 8 was affected. Drupal 8 uses components from the Symfony project. The Drupal community made the decision to use Symfony so that we didn’t have to maintain everything ourselves. So this is a great example of the power of open source, with the Symfony and Drupal security teams working together to release this fix. We all end up benefiting from having a larger community to fix issues. There’s no way an internal team working by themselves can write as secure applications on their own compared to open source software, in my opinion. It has nothing to do with how good you are, it’s the nature of development. With open source, you have a greater team with Drupal and then again, with Symfony, an even greater team to lean on. With each community that is included, you are expanding your team and your ability to detect and prevent threats.

How was the security vulnerability discovered?

Shrop: That’s generally never disclosed because you never want to tell malicious users how you found an opening.

But we do have a few people to thank: Michael Cullum and @chaosversum were thanked by Symfony for separately reporting the two issues addressed in Symfony security releases. They also thanked Nicolas Grekas for implementing the fix. I would also give a huge thanks to Symfony and the Drupal Security Team for coming together to implement the fix and for coordinating the announcements. It’s hard work, and it shows the community at its best.

So when we have an off-cycle security release, first the PSA comes out. Can you tell me a bit about what Mediacurrent does from the time the PSA comes out to just before the security advisory drops?

Flynn: As someone on the team at Mediacurrent, I can see some of the things you do. But I’m wondering what else happens behind the scenes?

Shrop: The first thing that happens is that I’m notified about the PSA coming out. I’m signed up for updates via email, Twitter, and RSS feeds from https://www.drupal.org/security, and so are a lot of other folks at Mediacurrent. Internally, we have some processes that we have standardized over time for how to deal with security updates that we follow across the company. We centralize information we have on the security PSA/advisory, recommend client communications, and talk about how to prepare as a team. We have multiple communication threads internally, as well, so no one can miss it. I send an email to the staff and I post in our Slack in a few places to get us ready.

Flynn: I know that we often clear time in advance for the team to implement the security updates.

Shrop: Yep. All of us share more information as a team as official information is released or as our own investigations reveal information. For example, early on the day the security advisory was released, our DevOps Lead, Joe Stewart, noticed that Symfony had put out a notice that they were also going to be releasing a security update that day, so that gave us a heads up that it might be related. We couldn’t know for sure until the security advisory actually came out, though. No one can do it by themselves, which is why we have a whole team working on it - it’s the only way to handle these things.

So then the security advisory drops. How did we go about fixing the issue?

Shrop: First, we reviewed the advisory to assess risk and for any mitigations that help determine how quickly we need to perform updates. With this advisory, it was needed pretty much immediately, so we started to update Drupal core for our clients and pushed to test environments. Our QA team performed regression testing related to the update. Once QA approved each update for each client, we worked with folks to approve the updates and release them to the live environments.

The important points are to line everyone and everything up in advance, have the talent in-house who can work on clients of all shapes and sizes and needs, and then to work as a team to resolve the issue on every client site as quickly as possible.

Were there any sites that were trickier to update? Why?

Shrop: Clients that were on older versions of Drupal Core, who had delayed upgrading, were harder to update. Every site was updated within a short time, regardless, but even though they started at the same time, those clients did not finish first, because there was more development and testing needed on each site.

Flynn: What was different about the process to update those sites?

Shrop: If a client wasn’t on version 8.5.x, the lead technologist on the project had to work on an alternative update to secure the site or application, since there wasn’t a security update released for it. Figuring out an alternative process on the fly always introduces risk. It’s part of the value that we bring, that we have team members that have the expertise to evaluate that sort of thing. For example, we had one new client that was on an older version of Drupal 8 core. So one of our Senior Drupal Developers had to go in and determine what to do. He ended up updating Symfony itself to mitigate the risk.

Flynn: I’m guessing that we are going to recommend to that client that we update Drupal core for them very soon?

Shrop: Yes. The big takeaway is you’re lowering your risk of problems by staying on the most recent, up-to-date minor version of Drupal 8. Version 8.5.x is current and stable right now, so you should be on that.

Flynn: Why would a client not update?

Shrop: There are always dynamics. I hear lots of good excuses, and I’m not exaggerating, they are good, real reasons! The client is busy, the client has multiple workstreams, it’s hard - but it is getting to a point where I want to recommend even more strongly to clients that it is more expensive to not upgrade. It is going to cost them more when there is an update because we have these additional evaluation and update tasks. The whole point of Drupal 8’s release cycle is to spread the maintenance cost over years rather than getting hit all at once.

Flynn: And it introduces greater risk. A security breach is an order of magnitude more expensive than extra mitigation steps.

Shrop: Definitely.

When is the next version of Drupal Core coming out?

Shrop: Version 8.6.0 will be released in September. Our teams are already starting to test the early versions of this release on some of our projects. If a security update comes out in September, we want all of our clients to be prepared by being on the currently supported version of Drupal core. That way, they will receive security updates.

Flynn: One of the nice things about the Drupal development community is that they provide the betas of the next version of Drupal core so you can get ahead of the next release, right?

Shrop: Yes. When the community starts releasing betas or release candidates, especially release candidates, you want to start testing ahead of time. If you have a Drupal site, you can get your developers to test. If you find a problem, it may not be with your site, it might be an issue with Drupal core and this is a great opportunity to contribute your findings back to drupal.org and help the greater community. There might be a security release weeks after a version comes out and you want to be prepared to implement it.

Flynn: It goes back to risk mitigation.

Shrop: If you are on, say, an 8.2 site right now, you’re on the higher risk side, unfortunately. We advise our clients that it is in their best interest to be on the current, stable version. It costs our clients more in the long run if they don’t update on a steady basis.

Flynn: So if you’re on an older version of Drupal Core, you might not get an easy-to-implement security update when a vulnerability is discovered?

Shrop: The quotes from the Drupal Security team I really want to emphasize are, “Previous minor releases will become unsupported when a new minor release is published,” and, “Any additional security updates for officially unsupported branches are at the sole discretion of the security team.” This is important to understand. For the SA Core 2018-002 fix earlier this year they provided release updates for older versions of Drupal… but they didn’t have to. In the case of the fix last week, they did not.

What was the best gif exchange of the Drupal core security update process?

Flynn: I nominate this one, from mid-afternoon:

Shrop: Definitely!

What story didn’t we tell yet?

Shrop: I think we covered most of it. The last thing I’d put out there is for the technical folks reading this. You need to read the security advisories, join Drupal Slack, read what Acquia, Pantheon, and others are saying about each announcement. Then, you take all of that in and make your assessment of what actions you are going to recommend your organization take. This should lead your organization to a documented security plan that you follow. But, you know…

Flynn: “Update all the things”?

Shrop: Exactly!

Other Resources
7 Ways to Evaluate the Security and Stability of Drupal Contrib Modules | Mediacurrent Pantheon Guest Blog
Security by Design: An Introduction to Drupal Security | Mediacurrent Webinar

Mark Shropshire Wed, 08/08/2018 - 08:29