Case Study: Arizona State University scales 2,000+ websites and frees up 2–3 full-time employees with Pantheon

How Arizona State University manages thousands of Drupal sites on Pantheon

Arizona State University’s central IT web team was responsible for supporting 2,000+ sites scattered across dozens of virtual machines and multiple CMSs. Self-hosting consumed the equivalent of 2–3 full-time employees, led to frequent security incidents (many non-Drupal sites were getting hacked), site crashes during traffic spikes, and a heavy support burden from non-technical users.

ASU standardized on a custom Drupal distribution called Open ASU and moved site operations to Pantheon, which provides turnkey, ASU‑branded sites with integrated SSL and SSO and one‑click security updates. The platform scaled for traffic spikes, made it easy for non-developers to launch and maintain sites, and freed up the team’s capacity (about 2–3 FTE) to focus on higher‑value work while improving security and uptime.

Arizona State University

Daniel Garcia-Mont

Web Application Developer