• Read more about Usability and UX Can Make Space Cool for Everyone

Back in 2013, when I first joined Mobomo, we migrated NASA.gov from a proprietary content management system (CMS) to Amazon Cloud and Drupal 7. It goes without saying, but there was a lot riding on getting it right. The NASA site had to handle high traffic and page views each day, without service interruptions, and the new content management system had to accommodate a high volume of content updates each day. In addition to having no room for compromise on performance and availability, the site also had to have a high level of security. 

Maybe the biggest challenge, though, was laying the groundwork to achieve NASA’s vision for a website with greater usability and enhanced user experiences. If NASA’s audience all fell into the same demographic, that goal probably wouldn’t have seemed so intimidating, but NASA’s audience includes space fans who range from scientists to elementary school kids. 

Our mission was to create a mobile-first site that stayed true to NASA’s brand and spoke to all of the diverse members of its audience. A few years later, we relaunched a user-centric site that directed visitors from a dynamic home page to microsites designed specifically for them.

Making Space Seem Not So Far Away

NASA.gov includes data on its missions, past and present. To make this massive amount of data more user-friendly, we worked with NASA to design a site that’s easily searchable, navigable, and enhanced through audio, video, social media feeds, and calendars. Users can find updates on events via features such as the countdown clock to the International Space Station’s 20th anniversary. NASA.gov users can also easily find what they need if they want to research space technology, stream NASA TV, or explore image galleries. 

The NASA.gov site directs its younger visitors to a STEM engagement microsite where students can find activities appropriate for their grade level. The site also includes the NASA Kids’ Club where students can have some fun while they’re learning about exploration. For example, they can try their hands at virtually driving a rover on Mars, play games, and download activities. 

Older students with space-related aspirations can learn about internship and career opportunities, and teachers can access lesson plans and STEM resources.

How to Make it Happen

To successfully achieve NASA’s goals and manage a project this complex, we had to choose the right approach. Some website projects are tailor-made for a simple development plan that moves from a concept to design, construction, testing, and implementation in a structured, linear way. The NASA.gov project, however, wasn’t one of them.

For this website and the vast majority of the sites we develop, our team follows DevOps methodology. With DevOps, you don’t silo development from operations. Our DevOps culture brings together all stakeholders to collaborate throughout the process to achieve:

Faster Deployment

If we had to build the entire site then take it live, it would have taken much longer for NASA and its users to have a new resource. We built the site in stages, validating at every stage. By developing in iterations, and involving the entire team, we also have the ability to address small issues rather than waiting until they create major ones. It also gives us more agility to address changes and keep everyone informed. This prevents errors that could put the brakes on the entire project.

Optimized Design

NASA.gov has several Webby Awards, and award-winning web design takes a team that works together and collaborates with the organization to define the audience (or audiences), optimize the site’s navigation and usability, and strike a balance between the site’s primary purpose and its appeal. 

Mobile-First

Because NASA.gov users may be accessing the site from a PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or other device, it was also pivotal to use mobile-first design. Mobile-first starts by designing for the smallest screens first, and then work your way up to larger screens. This approach forces you to build a strong foundation first, then enhance it as screen sizes increase. It basically allows you to ensure user experiences are optimized for any size device. 

Scalability

NASA.gov wasn’t only a goliath website when we migrated it to Amazon Cloud and Drupal. We knew it would continue to grow. Designing the site with microsites that organize content, help visitors find the content that is most relevant to their interests, and enhance usability and UX informed a plan for future growth. 

Efficient Development Processes

DevOps Methodology breaks down barriers between developers and other stakeholders, automates processes, makes coding and review processes more efficient, and enables continuous testing. Even though we work in iterations, our team maintains a big-picture view of projects, such as addressing integrations, during the development process. 

Planned Post-Production

DevOps also helps us cover all the bases to prepare for launch and to build in management tools for ongoing site maintenance. 

What Your Business Can Learn from NASA

You probably never thought about it, but your business or organization has a lot in common with NASA, at least when it comes to your website. Just like NASA, you need a website that gives you the ability to handle a growing digital audience, reliably and securely. You’re probably also looking for the best CMS for your website, one that’s cost-effective and gives you the features you need.

Your website should also be designed to be usable and to provide the user experiences your audience wants. And, with the number of mobile phone users in the world topping 5 billion, you want to make sure their UX is optimized with mobile-first design. 

NASA’s project is also an illustration of how building your website in stages, getting input from all stakeholders, and validating and testing each step of the way can lead to great results. You also need a plan for launching the site with minimal disruption and tools that will make ongoing management and maintenance easier. 

You probably want to know you are doing everything you can to make your content appealing, engaging, and interactive. You may think NASA has an advantage in that department since NASA’s content is inherently exciting to its audience.

But so is yours. Create a website that showcases it. Not sure where to begin? Click here and we’ll point you in the right direction.

• Read more about The Future of Cloud Services: What’s in Store for Your Business?

Where should your business data and processes “live?”

In the cloud? If so, then where in the cloud? Through cloud services such as Amazon Web Services?  Google Cloud? Microsoft Azure? Or should you turn to Cloudways brands such as DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr?

Or, maybe you should side with the number of businesses that primarily keep data on-premises, using static web technology to minimize exposure and optimize speed.

Then again, perhaps a mix of technologies – including tailored microservices – will help you achieve your objectives.

Read on as we discuss expert predictions on the future of cloud services, what your options are, and how to make the right tech choices for your business

Predictions on the Future of Cloud Services

Writer Nick Hastreiter interviewed a number of tech leaders recently for a piece on cloud services. These leaders, from disruptive startups to big-brand heavyweights, shared their vision on what to expect … and they don’t all agree with where things are heading:

• Michael Corrado of Hewlett Packard Enterprise thinks cloud computing will likely morph into a hybrid solution, combining cloud-based software and on-premises hardware. Such a solution would balance the scalability and flexibility of the cloud with the security of a private data center.
• Jeff Fisher of Kemptechnologies agrees, calling the future of cloud computing, “undeniably hybrid.” He predicts organizations will leverage multiple cloud platforms, both private and large-scale public (like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure), helping them avoid locking into a single provider. But, that will introduce additional complexity, as IT staff need to become comfortable operating in more than one cloud platform environment.
• On the other hand, SwiftType founder Mike Riley thinks by 2030, businesses will be operating mostly from the cloud, enjoying the productivity and efficiency that that platform provides. By then, he said, a major concern will relate to access. “We’re already seeing fragmentation of content and data and it’s posing problems related to organization, search, discovery, and most importantly, collaboration.” Riley predicts that monolithic application suites will be used less and less.
• David Hartley of UHY LLP takes things even further, predicting that “traditional data centers and the traditional model of delivering IT services will become extinct.” The days of building your own data center, owning your own equipment and installing or updating hardware will leave fade away rapidly, Hartley said. As software-, infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service providers assume a larger role, Hartley says, there will be more space for independent firms to be hired to test processes and controls, develop service organization control analyses, and report financial and IT services and processes to user organizations.

Overcoming the Cloud’s Limits

And what is Mobomo’s take on this?

We think organizations will take a critical approach, picking and choosing what works right for them. And in some cases, what’s “right” may not always be cloud-based.

Simply put, the cloud isn’t great for everything. You don't want to use it for active directory or credential management, for example. Latency precludes putting that large of an asset in the cloud unless you're a large-scale, widely based company. For about 95 percent of use cases, having an active directory or authentication onsite would make more sense than relying on cloud services, and in general, is more cost-effective.

The Resurgence of Static Pages

Another, perhaps surprising trend emerging is the return to static websites, or web pages with fixed content. Unlike dynamic websites, static sites don’t require programming or database design.

Two main drivers are behind this resurgence:

1. Page Speed

Some organizations are eschewing programmatic web pages because programming can slow or disrupt a user experience. The challenge, then, is to create static pages and host them out of an object data store such as Amazon S3. A flat file stored in S3 can serve a lot faster than if Drupal has to reach into a database, gather information, and render it into a page before the user can access it.

2. Security

One way to fend off hackers is to give them nothing to hack. If there's no CMS or programming to compromise, you can't be compromised. But using improperly secured S3, of course, introduces its own security concerns, primarily exposure to data leaks. But if you have S3 properly secured, then there's no way that a hacker can compromise your systems via your site.

Cloud services like S3 are easy to use, inexpensive, and provide static hosting without having to configure anything. You don't have to figure out how to put your data centers in storage partitions onto the web. S3 handles it for you.

The Role of Microservices

While microservices architecture is not exclusively relevant to cloud computing, according to IBM there are a few important reasons they so frequently are discussed together.

First and foremost are the utilization and cost benefits associated with deploying and scaling components individually.

True, these benefits are still present to some extent with on-premises infrastructure. But combining small, independently scalable components with on-demand, pay-per-use infrastructure enables much larger cost optimizations.

Another key advantage of microservices is that each individual component can adopt the stack best suited to its specific job. Cloud services are a boon here, as they can minimize the management challenges with stack proliferation.

Additionally, microservices can improve security. The more you separate out microservices, the more security layers you can wrap around each one. When individual services are able to run only when needed, you can better protect the system as a whole and possibly save money, too.

When it comes to cloud services in 2020, the theme is “right fit.” Organizations should look at the many different options available to them and pick and choose from these options to create customized systems that work best for their needs and their resources.

If you’re not sure what the right fit is, expert consultants (like the ones here at Mobomo) can help you assess the best options for your organization.

Contact us today to learn more.

• Read more about Mobomo Gets AWS TCO Certified

What Was Our Goal?

At Mobomo, we have pushed our employees to educate themselves on a variety of certifications in order to further their own professional growth, as well as team growth. The team was so excited about the Amazon Web Services Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Cloud Economics course that we had everyone from the Founder to our sales team complete it.  The reason behind this was to continue to work towards becoming an advanced partner with AWS. Mobomo was not always a cloud service provider, but we were backed into becoming one based on all of the other projects that we do and the cloud requirements for many of these projects. AWS has truly helped this portion of our business take off in 2018.

The Basics

This course specifically covers everything you might need to know about AWS TCO, from basics to an in-depth cost analysis. TCO is the total cost of ownership, which is defined as the initial purchase price of an asset plus it’s operating cost. If any item has a low TCO, this means it will be valued higher over time.  The most common comparison used to better understand TCO is a car. The common costs that are involved in purchasing a car are MSRP, registration and insurance, fuel, maintenance, and breakdowns. The TCO of a car is the initial purchase price PLUS all these costs that may be incurred throughout its lifetime.  This is the best way for a TCO newbie to understand the basic concept of TCO and this is a comparison that we continue to use throughout the Mobomo office.

Pricing Benefits of AWS You Should Know:

Mobomo has been working with AWS for an extended period of time and also partnered with Amazon to help created their tool, Mechanical Turk.  It was important for our team to have a solid understanding of the TCO concepts and the benefits of using AWS in regards to TCO in order to further our knowledge as well as continue our ongoing relationship with AWS.  All of the tools that AWS has provided and that we have had the benefit of using have been very valuable to the Mobomo team as a whole.

• Read more about Four Cloud Trends To Watch In 2018

As cloud technologies become an ever-more-critical part of the IT landscape, advancement in the DevOps and infrastructure space doesn’t look likely to slow down in 2018. We have outlined four trends that we expect to continue disrupting the ever-changing cloud ecosystem this year. 

Google and Microsoft Close Gap with Amazon

Over the years, Amazon Web Services has been the only leader in cloud services thus monopolizing the cloud market share and setting the pace of innovation. This year we expect Google and Microsoft to close the gap and begin to position themselves as true competitors to AWS.

As the number of fully-managed AWS services has grown -- now including multiple machine learning PaaS offerings, hosted graph database and “serverless” relational databases, as well as on-demand deep-learning-enabled video analysis -- Azure and Google Cloud have quietly been catching up in the market for core cloud services (storage and compute) which are core decision drivers for large enterprises.

Google has recently announced the lofty goal of building its cloud-services revenue to match what the company makes in advertising sales by 2020, an ambition which should leave Amazon wary given the Alphabet family’s ability to vertically integrate with its other robust brands.

At Mobomo, we have also noticed a pattern of customers wanting to build out parallel infrastructure in Azure or GCS, or even downsize AWS footprints to meet increasingly complex cloud posture requirements. 

Multi-Cloud is the New Hybrid Cloud

As market share in the public cloud space becomes less monopolized, “multi-cloud” will become the buzzword in 2018 that “hybrid cloud” was in years past.

More and more, the three major providers will compete on cost in mostly-commoditized markets like on-demand compute and short-term storage. This means the ability to bundle out workloads among the major public cloud providers will be at a premium.

Open-source tools like Terraform, which uses a lowest-common-denominator approach to allow architects to define cloud-agnostic infrastructure-as-code and deploy resources across multiple providers according to arbitrary metrics (resource cost per time unit, network latency to target, desired redundancy level or SLA requirements, etc).

The clear benefit of these open-source tools is the ability to avoid provider lock-in by using cloud-specific offerings like Amazon’s CloudFormation to define architecture.

If another public cloud offers better metrics for a particular workload, transferring those resources becomes a simple matter of lift-and-shift rather than a laborious re-architecture process.

One toolset that will continue to grow exponentially are microservice and container orchestration technologies, especially those based on the Kubernetes ecosystem.

With Amazon’s announcement of server-less ECS and Fargate in 2017, and competitor technologies from Azure and GCS there is no doubt containerization of workloads will be the most straightforward path to a true multi-cloud architecture.

Look for the microservice/container space to become even hotter in 2018, and for cloud consultancies to build practices around the Kubernetes ecosystem to enable true multi-cloud cost arbitrage.

Internet-of-Everything Brings Compute to the Edge

The story of cloud to date has been about decoupling compute power from physical hardware, enabling on-demand workloads to access arbitrary amounts of processing capacity.

Yet this model has retained the classic client-server architecture inherent in the previous generation’s paradigm: cloud compute exists in the cloud, and packets must make the full round-trip to cloud provider data centers in order for inputs to be transformed to outputs.

The year ahead looks to finally disrupt this last redoubt of traditional IT thinking. With the rise of ubiquitous Internet-of-Things devices and cloud-aware microcontroller hardware such as Amazon GreenGrass (not to mention extremely latency-sensitive applications like self-driving cars which need to communicate in real-time with other physically-adjacent devices without making an Internet roundtrip), compute capacity will move much closer to the edge in 2018.

Devices will intelligently determine which portions of compute workloads to process locally or offload to the cloud, based on factors like network availability and latency, output priority, compute market price, and application-level metrics.

Machine Learning Advances Insights-as-a-Service

As more deep learning compute moves to edge devices that push ever-increasing amounts of data into cloud storage, AI will find itself at a crossroads in 2018, with organizations of all sizes clamoring to implement machine learning algorithms to draw insights from larger and larger datasets.

At the same time, ML is moving further and further from the “metal”, as seen by 2017’s rapid advance from deep-learning IaaS solutions (such as hosted Apache MXNet) toward fully-managed ML PaaS services like Amazon SageMaker.

That means 2018 is the year machine learning takes another great leap toward the business intelligence user, becoming a key vertical in the turnkey SaaS market -- or, more accurately, enabling a new Insights-as-a-Service (iNaaS) solutions space in which cloud analytics platforms compete to combine multiple data streams, structured and unstructured (such as from sensors and IoT devices in addition to traditional application metrics and logs), and extract actionable conclusions for organizations.

The shift from machine learning PaaS to iNaaS will unlock artificial intelligence solutions for businesses at any scale, and all without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building Big Data infrastructure and algorithmic compute platforms.

What is your cloud adoption strategy for 2018? Are you thinking about migrating to the cloud? Take our cloud readiness assessment to see how you compare in the market or speak with one of our cloud engineers to determine how these trends will impact your business objectives!

• Read more about Cloud Migration Checklist

  Has your company decided to move to the cloud? Making the decision to migrate to the cloud is the easy part because there are so many positive benefits but now comes transferring the data which can be no easy feat. Think about migrating to the cloud as a process, one piece of the process builds off the last and once you have completed the process you have a successful migration! Take our cloud readiness assessment to see if your cloud migration initiative is moving in the right direction.   

Phase 1 Gather

Phase 2 Analyze

Phase 3 Plan

Phase 4 Execute

• Read more about Is Your Company Moving To The Cloud?

There are so many benefits of migrating to the cloud, many want to reduce cost while others want to improve their efficiencies. We get a lot of questions surrounding cloud migration so we decided to do a short Q & A - we know there are tons of questions that could be answered but this was our shortlist.

Why are so many businesses moving communications to the cloud?

Cloud infrastructure provides tools and reporting capabilities that need to be implemented as a central service to manage and report on software inventory and costing. Cost savings is a key benefit of cloud computing. Being able to dynamically inventory provisioned resources and services and match them with costing formulas, ensures continual insight into cloud expenses and continued ability to lower total cost of ownership.

What are the pain points that cloud adoption can address for cost-conscious, efficiency-minded IT and Ops teams?

Moving to the cloud requires a cost accounting model that can support charging for on-demand, dynamic infrastructure, as opposed to one that is based on purchasing dedicated hardware and depreciating it. Cloud infrastructure provides tools and reporting capabilities that need to be implemented as a central service to manage and report on software inventory and costing.

What is the tipping point for a business (your business) to make the move to the cloud?

Looks like you have done a thorough analysis of cloud environments in conjunction with physical data center options, matching application requirements and migration strategies to the appropriate environment capabilities. In addition, each application has a migration roadmap with pros, cons, and risks analyzed. That is a fantastic start to ensure a successful migration to the cloud. Prior to migration, your organization should perform a competitive analysis of various cloud options vs. physical data centers. Identify the risks and costs of migration and determine the migration strategy for each application: re-host, re-platform, repurchase, refactor / re-architect, retire, retain

What ramifications does this move have for IT/Ops/the organization?

To take full advantage of the cloud, both leadership and operational staff need to be trained in cloud best practices, communication transparency, and metric based accountability. The organization should have a plan to hire to cover any gaps. Your organization's deep understanding of cloud operations and the new skills needed to successfully maximize the value of new cloud environments will ensure success. Having already started training existing staff and recruiting new leaders is a good sign.

How does it impact end users and employees?

To take full advantage of the cloud, both leadership and operational staff need to be trained in cloud best practices, communication transparency, and metric based accountability. The organization should have a plan to hire to cover any gaps.Incentives for employees facing dramatic role changes should be implemented to ensure the organization embraces the training required for the new cloud capabilities. A strategy should be developed to identify alternate positions for resistant employees to prevent time and money costs. Moving to the cloud requires a cost accounting model that can support charging for on-demand, dynamic infrastructure, as opposed to one that is based on purchasing dedicated hardware and depreciating it. If you have questions that weren't answered, get in touch.

• Read more about NASA And Partners Exceed Eclipse Viewing Expectations

On a day where millions experienced a once in a lifetime total solar eclipse, NASA’s tireless efforts to provide the public with a seamless livestreaming experience of eclipse feeds from across the country resulted in one of the largest web-based events in U.S. government history. NASA’s coverage of the eclipse was a home run in the IT world and is a testament to the Agency’s commitment to technological excellence in everything they do in support of both their scientific endeavors and their duty to share their experiences with the world, showing that IT collaboration and partnership in the federal government is not only possible but wildly successful.

On Monday, Aug. 21, NASA surpassed expectations, streaming 18 live feeds from across the country, including high altitude balloon feeds, telescope views and shots from various aircraft situated along the path of totality from Oregon to South Carolina. Just as impressive as the content being served was the amount of web traffic NASA.gov received, recording over 30 million visitors over its 6 hours of coverage, resulting in over 80 million page views and at peak levels, sustained over 1.5 million concurrent users – all of which are record-shattering statistics for the Agency. Visitors to the site stayed an average of 3 minutes per session.

Livestreaming is no easy feat

An architecture supporting millions who are livestreaming is even harder. Not being able to accurately guess or predict just how many viewers would tune in and then planning for an architecture to support an unknown amount is daunting.

“We were in uncharted territory. We predicted that this would be our most watched event, but we didn’t really know to what level,” Nagaraja said. “Mobomo had the arduous task of testing [the site] to the limits that they possibly could and then being able to build something that could scale to the level above that depending on what happened on eclipse day.”

Crucial to the success of the eclipse coverage was ensuring that NASA.gov sustained high-performance levels while millions of users visited the website, which required significant planning and collaboration between NASA and members of the WESTPrime contract team, who manage both application development and the backend cloud-based infrastructure.

Mobomo, a Vienna-based software development company, serves on the WESTPrime team as a subcontractor to InfoZen and provides core web-developers that manage development efforts for NASA.gov and were tasked with constructing the eclipse live webpage.

“Providing this unprecedented access to the public required a sophisticated cloud infrastructure along with multiple backup plans and redundancies. This allowed NASA to rapidly scale delivery in proportion to viewership and segregate their live streams of the eclipse while incorporating autoscaling caches and other services to accommodate intense public interest,” said Sandeep Shilawat, Cloud Program Manager, InfoZen.

In addition to developing the main eclipselive page and an interactive solar eclipse map tracker, which allowed users to view the real-time progression of the eclipse across the continent, we were also tasked with stress-testing the website and its backend infrastructure to ensure it would perform at a high level under significant increases in user traffic. It was impossible to know just how many users would tune in to watch the event which made it very difficult to test.

Mobomo was responsible for building the back end of the web page and created the interactive graphic that tracked the eclipse in real time which enabled people to find the best viewing time for their geographic location. The biggest unknown was user testing. We were able to bring on a consultant to run a stress test on the site and simulate millions of people using the site at once. At the same time the consultant ran the test, Mobomo team had a few people head to the site to see how it felt. He didn’t tell them that at that very moment about over a million users were also on the site doing the same thing.

Huge win for Federal IT

NASA is the only known federal agency to use the cloud for such a large viewing event. The cloud was optimal in this case because of its elastic scalability and due to the amount of unknown users - we didn't have to change the infrastructure because its elastic and can scale automatically. Another advantage of the cloud in this case was the fact that we didn't have hardware to coordinate and manage - which ultimately results in cost savings. Pre- cloud, an agency would have to purchase hardware, software and services.

Overall impact?

An event such as the eclipse is ideally suited for the cloud, provides a pay-for-what-you-use model, and makes the scaling of infrastructure cost effective for federal agencies. NASA has set the bar for other agencies to follow when a mission requires reach and scale for citizen engagement.

• Read more about Why Drupal? Secure, Scalable, Social! (Part 2 of 3)

With Drupal, both developers and non-developer admins can deploy a long list of robust functionalities right out-of-the-box. This powerful, open source CMS allows for easy content creation and editing, as well as seamless integration with numerous 3rd party platforms (including social media and e-commerce). Drupal is highly scalable, cloud-friendly, and highly intuitive. Did we mention it’s effectively-priced, too?

In our “Why Drupal?” 3-part series, we’ll highlight some features (many which you know you need, and others which you may not have even considered) that make Drupal a clear front-runner in the CMS market.

For a personalized synopsis of how your organization’s site can be built on or migrated to Drupal with amazing results, grab a free ticket to Drupal GovCon 2015 where you can speak with one of our site migration experts for free, or contact us through our website.

_______________________________

SEO + Social Networking:

Unlike other content software, Drupal does not get in the way of SEO or social networking. By using a properly built theme--as well as add-on modules--a highly optimized site can be created. There are even modules that will provide an SEO checklist and monitor the site’s SEO performance. The Metatags module ensures continued support for the latest metatags used by various social networking sites when content is shared from Drupal.

E-Commerce:

Drupal Commerce is an excellent e-commerce platform that uses Drupal’s native information architecture features. One can easily add desired fields to products and orders without having to write any code. There are numerous add-on modules for reports, order workflows, shipping calculators, payment processors, and other commerce-based tools.

Search:

Drupal’s native search functionality is strong. There is also a Search API module that allows site managers to build custom search widgets with layered search capabilities. Additionally, there are modules that enable integration of third-party search engines, such as Google Search Appliance and Apache Solr.

Third-Party Integration:

Drupal not only allows for the integration of search engines, but a long list of other tools, too. The Feeds module allows Drupal to consume structured data (for example, .xml and .json) from various sources. The consumed content can be manipulated and presented just like content that is created natively in Drupal. Content can also be exposed through a RESTful API using the Services module. The format and structure of the exposed content is also highly configurable, and requires no programming.

Taxonomy + Tagging:

Taxonomy and tagging are core Drupal features. The ability to create categories (dubbed “vocabularies” by Drupal) and then create unlimited terms within that vocabulary is connected to the platform’s robust information architecture. To make taxonomy even easier, Drupal even provides a drag-n-drop interface to organize the terms into a hierarchy, if needed. Content managers are able to use vocabularies for various functions, eliminating the need to replicate efforts. For example, a vocabulary could be used for both content tagging and making complex drop-down lists and user groups, or even building a menu structure.

Workflows:

There are a few contributor modules that provide workflow functionality in Drupal. They all provide common functionality along with unique features for various use cases. The most popular options are Maestro and Workbench.

Security:

Drupal has a dedicated security team that is very quick to react to vulnerabilities that are found in Drupal core as well as contributed modules. If a security issue is found within a contrib module, the security team will notify the module maintainer and give them a deadline to fix it. If the module does not get fixed by the deadline, the security team will issue an advisory recommending that the module be disabled, and will also classify the module as unsupported.

Cloud, Scalability, and Performance:

Drupal’s architecture makes it incredibly “cloud friendly”. It is easy to create a Drupal site that can be setup to auto-scale (i.e., add more servers during peak traffic times and shut them down when not needed). Some modules integrate with cloud storage such as S3. Further, Drupal is built for caching. By default, Drupal caches content in the database for quick delivery; support for other caching mechanisms (such as Memcache) can be added to make the caching lightning fast.

Multi-Site Deployments:

Drupal is architected to allow for multiple sites to share a single codebase. This feature is built-in and, unlike Wordpress, it does not require any cumbersome add-ons. This can be a tremendous benefit for customers who want to have multiple sites that share similar functionality. There are few--if any--limitations to a multi-site configuration. Each site can have its own modules and themes that are completely separate from the customer’s other sites.

Want to know other amazing functionalities that Drupal has to offer? Stay tuned for the final installment of our 3-part “Why Drupal?” series!

• Read more about Mobomo Announces Management Changes

We are excited to announce expansion and growth of Mobomo's executive team:

Ken Fang, formerly CEO, will now serve as President of the company. Since joining in 2010, Ken has led Mobomo from a small startup to a company with over $5M in annual revenue, a more than tripled staff, consecutively high rankings by Inc. 5000, over 120 product launches, and an increasingly glowing client roster. In Ken's new role, he will be focused on high-level company strategy, corporate partnerships, and sales.

Brian Lacey will be assuming Ken's responsibilities as CEO. Brian joined Mobomo in 2011 as a Project Manager, and because of his passion for UX design, was quickly promoted to Creative Director. Within a short period of time, Brian was soon appointed COO, and under his tenure, Mobomo successfully built out well-defined design, development, and quality assurance capabilities. He also spearheaded the founding of the Buenos Aires office and helped acquire Exceptual Technologies, among other operational expansions.

Jesse Vizcaino will be assuming Brian's responsibilities as COO. In 2012, Jesse launched his Mobomo career as a Project Manager and quickly rose to Director. In his various roles, he has been instrumental in guiding Mobomo’s strategic direction, streamlining operations, and signing flagship customers such as the District of Columbia Retirement Board and the National Library of Medicine.

Please join us in congratulating Ken, Brian, and Jesse: we’re excited to see the great things they’ll accomplish in their new roles, and wish them all the best.