How Motiv Supercharged an International Bank’s dotCMS Implementation

One of the largest international financial institutions faced challenges in maintaining the synchronization of content across continents. The safety and security of their content are paramount. They are safeguarding millions of people’s life savings and maintaining ever-changing legal and financial compliance on an international scale. The bank operates with dotCMS as their content management system; and while dotCMS is a proven product, with a feature set that covers most users’ needs, it begins to fall short when stretched to the absolute limits of scale. This bank is not most users. The scale of operation and confidence in the security of data left the institution limited by their dotCMS implementation. Bolstering dotCMS with Motiv ImpulseSync™ and Motiv’s experts gives the software the capability to handle the immense scale that the institution operates at.

Specifically, push publishing features hindered their ability to maintain content synchronization across their different headquarters in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Each one of those locations needs full read and write access to all the content, and one location making changes should be visible at any of the other headquarters without latency issues. High latency and time to synchronize are primary issues with utilizing dotCMS at this scale, and by intelligently tracking changes, ImpulseSync™ allows continuous synchronization of the changes to content without redundant uploads taking up bandwidth. Furthermore, the bank gained additional confidence in the security of their content due to the disaster recovery tools that are inherent to intelligently tracking changes to content. Any previous state of the CMS can be recalled, providing a clear solution to imminent cases of cloud providers going down.

Of course disaster recovery grants backups of content for worst-case scenarios, but ImpulseSync™ goes one step further and gives dotCMS users another layer of insulation by implementing hybrid cloud setups that diversify where content is stored. Any combination of cloud providers and on-prem storage options are possible, and for users like this financial institution, the peace of mind these features grant are priceless. This flexibility is crucial when facing issues of compute scaling. ImpulseSync™ gives the bank the ability to avoid costly and complex clustering to address high compute demands. Instead of buying the most powerful new computer and adding the most expensive components to meet demands, or creating complex clusters of machines, Motiv can simply distribute the banks’ compute load over to more machines.

“If part of the system encounters heavy traffic or load, IT should be able to add more cloud nodes or servers to that discrete part without having to throw more memory and CPU at the problem–blindly praying it will just go away.”

— Jason Tesser, CTO — Motiv Solutions

Horizontal scaling gives the bank the ability to avoid needing the most powerful and expensive machines and computing components and gives the freedom to place these machines anywhere — both of these options being previously inaccessible to Nomura due to dotCMS restrictions. They were forced to go down a clustering and vertical scaling route that prevented them from meeting their primary goals of maintaining low latency synchronization of content across their three headquarter locations, each on separate continents.

dotCMS is a powerful system, but one that has small cracks that show themselves when the software is pushed to the limit. Motiv’s experts and ImpulseSync™ fill these cracks to create a dotCMS implementation that excels as it scales.

For more information on Motiv Solutions and ImpulseSync™, visit MotivSolutions.com