The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA is a top-ranked institution dedicated to advancing medical education, research, and patient care. Known for its commitment to innovation, diversity, and excellence, the school prepares the next generation of physicians and scientists. 

The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA Health rely heavily on their Digital Technology team, which manages and supports over 170 websites that power many educational and informational services. However, the team faced significant challenges with their legacy Drupal platform, including slow deployment processes, frequent downtime and a sluggish support system. With heavy reliance on the community to curate and maintain their sites' content, frequent maintenance windows and unreliable test environments led to slow adoption and reluctance to update sites.

The School migrated its websites to Pantheon, leveraging its automated tools and robust hosting infrastructure. With additional APIs and a complete toolset in Terminus, the development team of three shifted their focus back to developing new features while spending less time and energy on site maintenance.  

By migrating to Pantheon, I got my life back. For David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, solving this problem meant regaining control and efficiency. The burden of manual processes and slow support responses was lifted.” 

– Paul Babin, Web Systems Manager at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Read on for migration details and technical results. 

Challenge: Managing a Vast Web Presence

Before migrating to Pantheon, UC Health’s website infrastructure was inefficient and difficult to maintain. The key pain point was complex site management. The organization managed 170+ websites, each requiring manual updates and maintenance. Running a Drupal Multisite theming model made portfolio customization an incomplete, manual process, where all site functionality got locked down into a cookie-cutter template. Other issues included:

• Slow deployment process: Site updates were serialized, leading to three-hour backend downtime during releases, which prevented content editors from updating sites.
• Limited development flexibility: No dedicated development environments, making it difficult to test updates before deployment.
• Inefficient support and troubleshooting: Issues took days or even weeks to resolve due to poor customer support and limited analytics.
• Manual CDN & WAF Management: Required significant IT resources to maintain security and performance settings.

Image

Solution: Efficient Migration to Pantheon

The initial migration plan was a conservative estimate of two weeks, moving only two sites per day. But with Pantheon’s powerful Terminus feature, all sites with their databases and files were migrated in hours. 

Key solutions included:

• Automated site creation: Using Pantheon’s Terminus command-line tool, UC Health created 174 sites in just 36 minutes.
• Parallelized Deployment: By implementing parallel processes, site updates now take 10–15 minutes instead of hours.
• Improved support and analytics: UC Health now benefits from multi-channel support (Slack, email, phone) with maximum 2-hour response times. Additionally, Pantheon’s built-in analytics provide better data for decision-making.
• Simplified security management: WAF and SSL updates are now managed through Pantheon’s human-supported request system, reducing IT workload.

Enhanced support, analytics and tooling

Pantheon's support system offered a 92% faster issue resolution time, with multiple communication channels and responses typically within two hours, compared to next-day responses and weeks-long resolutions with the previous host. “Tooling on Pantheon is easier to use and manage, with custom scripts creation simplified through the Robo Task Runner and Terminus integration,” said Babin.

Pantheon provided improved reporting insights with individual logs for each site, making it easier to troubleshoot issues without complex SQL queries. Analytics are now available through Terminus, allowing for automated data-driven decision-making and reporting, which was previously difficult to obtain from the former host. This is especially beneficial due to legal restrictions on using third-party trackers like Google Analytics.

Pantheon's managed CDN and WAF services reduced the need for internal management and coordination with other departments. The simplified process for updating WAF rules, managed by Pantheon's team, eliminated the need to involve networking and cybersecurity departments for standard processes. This resulted in time savings and reduced interruptions to other teams within the organization.

Results: Significant Development Gains

The migration to Pantheon resulted in significant improvements in performance, efficiency and reliability. By leveraging automation and better infrastructure, the organization now delivers a superior digital experience for patients, students, medical staff and developers.

• 85% reduction in development downtime (from 3 hours to 10–15 minutes).
• 92% faster issue resolution, shifting from days/weeks to within the same day.
• 86% faster site response times, improving user experience.
• 52 engineering days saved per year by eliminating manual troubleshooting and inefficient workflows.
• Seamless release process, allowing updates to be deployed during working hours without disruption.
• Improved site availability, reducing unplanned downtime and interruptions.
• More efficient interdepartmental collaboration, with clearer logs, automated analytics, and reduced dependency on IT for networking adjustments.

“Now, when we push to production, it’s unicorns and rainbows! Things happen fast and the team is happy,” summarized Babin.