Why Sitecore Is the Best Choice for Regulated Industries

Are you in a regulated industry such as pharmaceuticals, healthcare, or financial services? Here’s 5 reasons why Sitecore is the logical choice for you.

Regulated industries—such as Healthcare & Life Sciences, Pharmaceuticals, Financial Services, Energy, Oil & Gas, and Telecommunications—face a unique set of challenges when it comes to managing their web presence.

When choosing a Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), companies in these industries must consider much more than cool marketing features. These industries need to choose a platform that not only propels their customer experience forward with powerful marketing capabilities, but they also need a platform that comes out-of-the-box with all the tools they need to easily satisfy all of their compliance obligations.

This is where Sitecore comes in. To help aid decision makers in these industries with making a DXP platform decision, we’ve come up with 5 reasons we feel that the Sitecore DXP is the logical choice for regulated industries.

1. Sitecore offers multi-site content management

For enterprise organizations charged with the responsibility of supporting multiple websites, a critical measure of your long-term success will be whether you have achieved economies of scale.

An enterprise DXP such as Sitecore provides the best structure for creating economies of scale through its unique ability to set up a content architecture that provides a method of creating shared templates, modules, and content across multiple sites.

Leveraging a modular approach with Sitecore enables content to be used in an infinite number of combinations. A shared repository of templates and modules allows for the rapid setup and deployment of additional sites and/or sections. Each site can have its own variation on the styling, but the core functionality can be maintained across all. Having a single instance of Sitecore also means that you’re only maintaining and upgrading one environment, instead of multiple.

By contrast, single instance DXP solutions like WordPress, are not a suitable DXP solution for an entire enterprise organization. By definition, these types of DXP solutions require you to build out each site as a separate set of pages that must be manually maintained and enhanced individually.

This forces you to manually manage multiple websites on a page-by-page basis, even when they share common assets and must comply with common regulatory guidelines. This complicates corporate governance, while eliminating any possibility of economy of scale. Furthermore, deploying each site on its own isolated application instance and/or servers, multiplies the level of effort and complexity required to upgrade and maintain a large portfolio of websites. As a result, this could significantly increase the total cost of ownership over the long run.

2. Sitecore optimizes code reuse and maintenance

Another significant opportunity to create economies of scale is with code reuse and maintenance. A properly architected implementation of Sitecore maximizes code re-use and minimizes the level of maintenance effort, by allowing companies to build modules that are designed to be reused on any site.

In addition, Sitecore has established a set of development best practices called “Helix principles” that provides clear guidance on how to build, reuse, scale, and maintain your code base over time. The Helix principles help developers ensure that the code, modules, and front-end follow a logical structure and parse code down to smaller increments to maximize the ability to use it across functions.

3. Sitecore provides multi-language translation and localization

Sitecore’s out-of-the-box multi-language and localization capabilities are easy to set up and even easier to use. Its flexibility allows for not only targeted language translation, but also for targeted content based on region, enabling your content editors to tailor imagery and text based on a visitor’s cultural context.

Additionally, multi-language translation can be managed directly from within the Sitecore interface using a connector. There are multiple very robust language translation connectors available for Sitecore. Two we recommend include Globalization Partners International (GPI) and Translations.com.

Leveraging a Sitecore connector to manage multiple languages on your website allows you to select, get a price quote, and send content out for translation—without ever leaving Sitecore. When the translation is complete, marketers can easily import the translated content directly back to the point of origin, all within the Sitecore interface.

This saves your marketers and content managers a massive amount of time and hassle because a tech-savvy person does not have to be involved with the translation process, nor does it require an army of workers to manually enter and maintain the translated content by cutting and pasting from spreadsheets!

4. Sitecore facilitates user privacy and data regulation

In heavily regulated industries, such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, and pharma – content must flow through multiple review steps, including legal, before it can be published to the site.

Sitecore makes it easy to establish workflows that mirror the process your organization already follows, including notifications, audit trails of content, and restriction of various content based on purview.

In addition, Sitecore allows you to create user roles that provide different levels of access and site management functionality to different types of users. This enables you to maintain legal compliance and brand standards across all of your sites when you have users with various levels of technical aptitude and attention to detail.

If GDPR is a concern, you will be interested to know that as of version 9, Sitecore has several features and functions that help ensure that you’re in compliance with these laws. Chief among these are functions around identification, removal, and obfuscation of a user’s data.

Having processes you can tap into for these efforts is becoming a vital part of planning and maintaining a website. If these topics are applicable to your company, make sure you’re selecting a DXP that makes these responsibilities manageable.

5. Sitecore protects your site with multiple layers of security

For any organization in a highly regulated industry, the security of your website and the data associated with it is paramount.

This is one of the largest reasons why, time and time again, government agencies and companies in highly regulated industries choose Sitecore. It provides and supports multiple layers of security, ensuring your organization is able to achieve the greatest level of security possible.

First and foremost, Sitecore’s core architecture has specific security models in place to separate data from the rendered site. Additionally, Sitecore is designed to run on a secure server environment in a tiered architecture, which places databases and staging activities behind firewalls and severely limits access to these resources.

By contrast, WordPress is an open source DXP that is built and maintained by a group of volunteer developers, who are not accountable or held to any security standards—helping explain why WordPress is notorious for falling victim to hacking, DDOS attacks, and data breaches. These security breaches commonly render sites unusable and routinely cost companies significant financial losses in terms of downtime, remediation, legal services, reputation/PR, and lost business.

Why Sitecore is the logical choice for regulated industries

We strongly recommend Sitecore for clients in regulated industries who want to deliver a fully secure, hyper-personalized experience for their customers—all through a DXP that’s easy for your entire team to use.

Oshyn is a trusted Sitecore Certified Solutions Partner that specializes in Sitecore implementations and digital marketing solutions. We look forward to discussing how we can be of service to you. Schedule a time to talk with us now.