Oshyn's Sitecore Technical Audit Process

CIOs and CTOs alike face great challenges in advancing digital transformation. According to Gartner, “84% of CIOs already have responsibility for areas of the business outside traditional IT — the most common being innovation and transformation.” With our focus on Sitecore and integrated digital marketing platforms, we’ve seen the struggles firsthand. So we created our Technical Audit for Sitecore to quickly give senior IT professionals a constructive analysis of their current situation and a roadmap for how to improve both how well the system performs and how to leverage under-utilized features of the platform.

We have put our years of Sitecore expertise into a combination of automated tools and qualitative analysis to produce recommendations that can immediately be put to work improving your Sitecore solution. Our analysis includes everything found in our Sitecore Technical Best Practices and Sitecore Content Editing and Marketing Best Practices into recommendation form to give you tangible actions on what you can do to improve your Sitecore Digital Experience Platform.

Our process always starts with listening. We need to hear from the stakeholders to really understand what the issues are with their site and Sitecore implementation, so we understand how to properly focus the technical audit on the areas that make the most impact for them. This starts with a simple interview by Oshyn's team which results in documentation of the current state of your Sitecore system.

The overall process we follow for a technical audit is:

Oshyn takes a comprehensive approach to the audit checking the following areas:

1. Sitecore
   • Configuration
   • Item Structure
   • Templates
   • Layouts / CSHTML
   • Modules
   • Caching
   • Helix
   • Search
   • xDB
   • Under-utilized Features
2. .NET Project & C#
   • Code Complexity
   • Dependencies
   • Security / Vulnerabilities
3. Processes
   • Development environments
   • Code release
4. Architecture of all environments

In all the above areas, we check over 100 different elements that fall into the following 5 impact categories:

1. Performance
2. Scalability
3. Availability
4. Security
5. Best Practices

For each recommendation we make across these areas and categories, Oshyn also provides:

1. Impact or why the change is important; what could go wrong is or is going wrong without the recommended change
2. Effort to perform the recommended change
3. Downtime required for making the recommended change
4. Risk associated with making the recommended change
5. Resources required to make the recommended change
6. Whether the change should be considered to be done in a short, medium or long term time horizon

Some useful add-ons that can be added to Oshyn Sitecore Technical Audit include:

1. UI development code such as Javascript, CSS and HTML
2. Sitecore upgrade readiness: how ready is your site for an upgrade and what needs to be done to make it happen
3. Cloud architecture audit: if site is hosted in Azure or AWS, Oshyn will evaluate the configuration and setup of the cloud resources

After Oshyn has completed the Sitecore Technical audit, our recommendations include both detailed action items for the development team to start on right away, as well as management presentations that can be utilized to elucidate the large takeaways from the current state and where we recommend taking your Sitecore system next. If you have a Sitecore system you suspect is running less than optimally, this is the first, best, and quickest way to get it running better.