Case Study - Ten years of platform debt, cleared in stages
A criminal justice college in New York moved from an ageing Drupal 7 site on on-premises Windows servers to a supported, monitored Drupal platform, without taking academic services offline.
- Client
- A criminal justice college in New York
- Year
- Service
- Enterprise Website Builds
Overview
Drupal 7 was approaching end of life, and the sites carrying the college's academic, admissions and student services content were still on it. Those are not pages a college can take down for a weekend. The hosting underneath was its own problem: on-premises Windows servers run by another team inside the institution, an arrangement that had worked once but no longer matched what a modern Drupal and PHP environment needs.
The rebuild
The migration ran Drupal 7 and Drupal 9 in parallel, so content, structure and components moved progressively rather than in one cutover. Nothing had to be finished before anything else could start, which is what kept student-facing services available throughout. A senior project manager held the stakeholder side, a migration lead designed the technical approach, and a backend developer and two site builders carried the build.
The migration
The later phase moved hosting to Pantheon. The codebase consolidated into GitLab, CI/CD pipelines were configured, and the database and file archives were prepared so that server collation and file transfer problems were resolved before they became launch problems. The migration ran with content freezes, a planned DNS cutover, and full validation ahead of go-live. Drupal 9 went to Drupal 10 in the same window rather than as a separate project.
New Relic and Uptime Robot now report into Slack, so performance and uptime problems surface before somebody reports them. We trained the college's communications and IT staff on deployment workflows, local development, and day-to-day maintenance.
The outcome
The college runs on supported, optimised Drupal hosting with improved uptime and a workflow its own team can operate. Quarterly scans and fixes hold the site to WCAG-aligned accessibility, which for a public institution is an obligation rather than a preference. The college re-engaged for the 2026 maintenance programme, including the planned move from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11.