The content management system market can be roughly divided into two segments. The first includes mass-market platforms such as WordPress, while the other consists of enterprise solutions for large organizations.

One of the biggest players in this latter market is Liferay Inc., whose software powers thousands of services ranging from VMware Inc.’s customer portal to government information hubs. The company today unveiled a new iteration of its system specifically built to run in the cloud.

Strictly speaking, Liferay DXP Cloud isn’t a CMS but rather a “digital experience platform.”  This is a relatively new category that has recently come to encompass once-disparate solution types such as content management software, internal employee portals and marketing tools. Analyst firm Gartner Inc. released its first Magic Quadrant report for the segment in January.

Liferay DXP Cloud is launching with an extensive set of management features, some of which place an emphasis on automation. Among them is a mechanism that fine-tunes the amount of infrastructure allocated for a cloud deployment based on fluctuations in user demand.

Liferay said that the feature can automatically add computing resources and bandwidth when there’s a sudden surge in traffic, as well as deprovision the extra hardware once activity levels return to normal. All the while, Liferay DXP Cloud keeps administrators in the loop through notifications detailing infrastructure changes.

For deeper visibility into hardware usage, operations teams can turn to the platform’s monitoring console. Liferay includes dashboards that track processor utilization, data transfer rates and other infrastructure metrics along with the overall health of an environment. The platform also enables companies to collect development logs about the custom features that they add to their deployments for bug detection purposes.

The latter capability is one of several Liferay DXP Cloud offers for dealing with potential technical issues. It’s joined by an automated backup tool and high-availability features that enable companies to build fault-tolerance into certain parts of their deployments, which helps mitigate the impact of outages.

Over in the security department, the platform provides extensive support for encryption that encompasses, among other things, data copies created using the automated backup function. It’s paired with access controls that enable companies to regulate who can access what parts of a Liferay DPX Cloud deployment.

Photo: Liferay