Migration to Composable and Headless Platform Meets High Demands 

Northrop Grumman Corporation (NGC) is a global aerospace and defense technology company, and one of the largest defense contractors in the world. They work to solve the toughest problems in space, aeronautics, defense, and cyberspace to meet the ever-evolving needs of their customers.  

When NGC faced significant struggles with their existing website platform, they partnered with AgencyQ to implement a Sitecore-based solution. To properly serve the business needs of this large-scale organization, a solution providing world-class performance and reliability was required—one that provided the necessary performance, scalability, uptime, and security to meet these incredibly high demands. 

AgencyQ began this project by thoroughly documenting the functional requirements for the new site and architecting a composable approach that included several complex integrations. The solution was crafted to be future-proof, by ensuring 100% compliance with the Sitecore XM Cloud platform, which provides a clear path to a future migration.

We implemented two NextJS-based headless websites, as it was clear that the decoupled architecture was the most effective way to meet NGC’s stringent security and performance requirements.  

• Performance: This site is a critical piece of the NGC communications infrastructure and must stand up to demand. Selecting a NextJS-based solution hosted on the Vercel platform was the most direct path to achieve this.
• Scalability: NGC can experience dramatic fluctuations in their web traffic. The solution absolutely had to be scalable on demand. This can be a struggle with traditional Model-View-Controller (MVC) based approaches but is easily handled with the increased edge distribution of headless solutions.
• Uptime: This site requires as near to 100% uptime as possible. Leveraging the Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) features of the NextJS framework allows for the reliability of a statically generated website combined with the dynamic flexibility required of modern digital experience platforms.
• Security: NGC is an extremely security forward organization. By moving their website out to the edge with a headless solution, public traffic can be fully isolated from their content operations, providing exceptional security coverage. 

The new NGC websites yielded a 30% increase in page speed, ranking their site in the top 1% of sites on the internet (according to Google PageSpeed Insights / Lighthouse), and have produced a 17% increase in organic search referrals.

From the site management perspective, internal silos were broken down thanks to the implementation of Sitecore Workflow for publishing and content approvals, leading to improved communication between disparate teams. In addition, NGC took the opportunity to establish new best practices such as creating a centralized enterprise ticketing system, which ensures strategic alignment on new page requests. It has also allowed for greater flexibility in management / presentation of content.