Why high-availability Drupal is now a public sector infrastructure question

Public sector websites and applications are critical service delivery infrastructure, not brochures. Whether it’s a citizen checking their rights and entitlements, a commuter planning a journey, or a business looking up licensing requirements, the expectation is the same: the site works, every time, immediately. That expectation has made high-availability Drupal one of the more important, and underappreciated, conversations in public sector digital right now.

The Drupal 11 moment

There’s a lot of energy around Drupal 11 in the public sector at the moment, and for good reason. For organisations still running Drupal 9 or earlier versions of Drupal 10, the upgrade path is both an obligation and an opportunity. Drupal 9 reached end of life in 2023. That means no more security patches, and for any public body handling citizen data, that’s not a theoretical risk, it’s a governance issue.

But the conversation shouldn’t stop at the upgrade. Drupal 11 brings meaningful improvements in performance, accessibility compliance, and editorial experience that public sector teams genuinely benefit from. The content workflows are cleaner. The front-end rendering is faster. And the architecture sits far more naturally on modern cloud infrastructure, which matters enormously when you’re trying to build something that will still be fit for purpose in 2030.

The question we hear most often isn’t “should we move to Drupal 11?” It’s “how do we move without disrupting services, and what does the infrastructure look like on the other side?”

Autoscaling: built for the moments that matter most

Public sector traffic is not evenly distributed. A budget announcement, a public health update, a change to a consumer rights scheme, these events can send traffic to a government or regulatory website spiking in minutes. Legacy hosting arrangements, often provisioned for average load rather than peak demand, buckle under that pressure at exactly the wrong moment.

The answer isn’t to overprovision and pay for capacity you rarely use. It’s to build on infrastructure that scales automatically in response to real demand. At Marino, we deploy Drupal on AWS with autoscaling built in from the ground up. Using AWS Auto Scaling with Elastic Load Balancing, the system dynamically adjusts compute resources in response to traffic patterns. Expanding when demand spikes, contracting when it normalises. For a public body whose website is its primary channel to citizens, that elasticity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a service continuity requirement.

Managed services: keeping the lights on, proactively

High availability isn’t just about infrastructure architecture. It’s about what happens at 11pm on a Sunday when something goes wrong.

Our managed services wrap around every Drupal deployment we support. That means continuous monitoring through AWS CloudWatch, with alerts routed to an on-call technical team with a 15-minute response SLA for critical incidents. It means security patches applied within 72 hours of release for critical vulnerabilities. It means scheduled maintenance windows agreed in advance, outside peak hours, with 48 hours’ notice as standard.

For public sector clients, this matters beyond operational continuity. Regulators, auditors, and internal governance teams increasingly want to see documented evidence of how digital infrastructure is maintained and secured. A well-structured managed service arrangement, with monthly reporting and clear SLAs, gives IT and compliance teams something concrete to point to.

The 99.9% uptime commitment

We commit to 99.9% availability as standard across our Drupal hosting engagements, measured monthly and excluding agreed maintenance windows. That’s roughly 45 minutes of permitted downtime per month, a threshold that, in our experience, public bodies find both meaningful and achievable when the underlying infrastructure is designed correctly.

Achieving it consistently requires more than a good hosting environment. It requires a disaster recovery strategy with tested failover, database replication, and defined Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives. For our public sector clients, we target an RTO of under one hour and an RPO of 15 minutes for critical systems, benchmarks drawn from real engagements with organisations where downtime has direct citizen impact.

What good looks like

The public bodies we work with, across transport, health, financial regulation, and national infrastructure, share a common need: digital platforms that their teams don’t have to worry about. Not because nothing ever goes wrong, but because when something does, there’s a process, a team, and a track record to rely on.

Drupal 11 is a strong foundation. Cloud-native, autoscaling infrastructure built on AWS gives it the resilience it needs. A proactive managed service keeps it performing. And clear, documented SLAs give everyone, from the IT team to the board, the visibility they need.

If your organisation is approaching a Drupal upgrade, or you’re questioning whether your current hosting arrangement is really fit for purpose, we’d welcome a conversation.

Marino Software is a technology partner to public sector organisations such as Met Éireann, RTÉ, Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail), the Health Insurance Authority (HIA), Translink and the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).