How Aurecon eliminated downtime and optimised Sitecore performance

By Carl Brown

Project background

Aurecon is a leading APAC design, engineering, and advisory company with a presence in over 11 locations. They provide innovative solutions across various sectors, including energy, resources, water and digital infrastructure.

Aurecon sought a partner to meet their needs and protect their digital investment.

Upon engaging with Aurecon, we identified several challenges within their existing Sitecore platform, including architectural complexities causing outages, suboptimal monitoring and logging practices, and inadequate documentation, all of which hindered their ability to maintain optimal website performance and user experience.

Key results at a glance

🔒 100% reduction in security-related errors, improving platform resilience.

🧭 98.8% reduction in navigation-related errors, enhancing user experience.

🚀 Zero downtime since implementing optimisations.

The Sitback difference

Recognising the urgency of addressing these challenges, we undertook a comprehensive onboarding and optimisation process to enhance Aurecon’s digital presence.

Our solution encompassed:

Deep dive and recommendations: Conducted an in-depth analysis of the platform’s architecture, leading to a prioritised remediation plan to address core issues.
Stakeholder workshops: Facilitated workshops to establish clear roles, responsibilities, communication protocols, and escalation procedures. We also collaborated with Aurecon to define monitoring, logging, and disaster recovery protocols to ensure platform resilience.
Configuration and monitoring: Implemented robust platform and application monitoring tools, including Azure alert monitoring, to enable real-time visibility and proactive issue resolution.
Security and documentation updates: Updated and aligned documentation covering processes, architecture diagrams, and security hardening measures to enhance resilience and knowledge sharing across teams.

Continuous support and optimisation

Sitback has provided ongoing support and performance enhancements to Aurecon’s Sitecore platform for over 20 months, focusing on:

Web Application Firewall (WAF) audits and security hardening
Application Insights log reviews across multiple environments
Azure alert monitoring audits and performance reviews
Optimisation of CPU & DTU usage for cost and performance efficiency
Strict-Transport-Security and security headers configuration
Scaling and cost reduction strategies in Azure hosting

“Sitback has been an invaluable partner in strengthening our Sitecore platform. Their expertise in security, monitoring, and optimisation has eliminated downtime, improved performance, and reduced costs. With their proactive support, we have a more stable, scalable, and resilient digital platform that supports our business goals.”

Jessica Costes

IT Business Partner, Aurecon

Key achievements

Since implementing our recommendations, Aurecon has seen significant improvements:

Performance and stability

100% reduction in key security-related errors, including SecurityTokenSignatureKeyNotFoundException and Null Reference issues.
98.8% reduction in navigation-related errors, improving site accessibility and user experience.
83.72% decrease in SOLR connection errors, ensuring faster content delivery and indexing reliability.

Security and reliability

Implementation of Content Security Policy, X-Frame-Options, and Referrer-Policy headers, hardening the platform against vulnerabilities.
OWASP security tests passed successfully after mitigation efforts.
Establishment of disaster recovery static pages in Azure Blob Storage, enabling automated failover for better resilience.

Cost and resource optimisation

By improving system efficiency and reducing errors, we enabled Aurecon to scale down their Azure resources without compromising performance:

Master database optimised from S2 (50 DTU) to S1 (20 DTU), saving ~$27.98 USD/month.
Content Delivery and Content Management App Services reduced from P2V2 to P1V3, saving ~$151.84 USD/month.

These optimisations have significantly improved platform uptime, performance, and security while reducing hosting costs, ensuring a more stable and efficient Sitecore platform for Aurecon.

Results

Before our intervention, the website regularly experienced outages, including 22 downtimes in one month, totalling over 4 hours. Since deploying our recommended updates, there has been zero downtime.

Through our tailored support and optimisation services, Aurecon now benefits from:

Improved platform stability and availability
Enhanced security and compliance with best practices
Reduced operational costs and optimised infrastructure
Stronger collaboration and governance frameworks

Our partnership with Aurecon continues to drive ongoing improvements, ensuring their digital platforms remain resilient, high-performing, and secure in an evolving landscape.

Struggling with website downtime or performance issues?

If security risks, platform instability, or rising infrastructure costs are holding your digital experience back, we can help. Our team specialises in optimising complex platforms like Sitecore to improve resilience, enhance performance, and reduce ongoing costs.

Let’s talk about making your website faster, safer, and more reliable.

Website Support & Optimisation Sitecore development Contact us