Your data portal should not need your constant attention. We run the infrastructure, apply the patches, so your team can focus on the data.
Most portal failures are not sudden. They accumulate over time. A deferred security patch. An unmonitored disk. A CKAN version that drifts three releases behind until an upgrade stops being a task and becomes a major project.
Link Digital operates your portal on AWS infrastructure that we architect, maintain, and monitor ourselves. We have over a decade of experience working on Drupal and CKAN deployments on AWS.
As co-stewards of the CKAN project, we do not wait for release notes. Our engineers work inside the project that produces them. Security advisories reach us as they are prepared, and your environment is assessed against them as part of our managed hosting service, rather than as an escalation when things go wrong.
What this covers:
Organisations running portals that feature a combination of CKAN for data management and Drupal for their public-facing content management typically must hold two contracts with two vendors. When something breaks in the seam between them, the first hour goes to establishing whose problem it is. That hour is billed to you twice, and it is incurred by your staff trying to figure out the problem.
Link Digital supports both platforms with a single agreement. One team. One escalation path. One invoice.
Alongside hosting, support, and maintenance, our agreements also include a full suite of enterprise account management services: roadmapping, cross-briefing of new requirements between your teams and ours, and regular meetings that keep priorities visible on both sides.
Support hours are drawn from a monthly allocation. They can be spent on incidents, scheduled maintenance, or planned enhancement work, according to what your portal needs that month.
The tiers below describe the shape of an engagement, not a fixed product. Each is illustrated with a scenario drawn from the kinds of portals we operate. Find the one that resembles yours.
Around forty datasets, updated quarterly, with no development roadmap. Most months have no incidents. The hours go to patch assessment, monitoring, backup restore verification, and a short written health summary. The team learns a patch was applied by reading it.
Launched for one faculty, now expanding to four, each team bringing its own metadata conventions and a harvester to configure. Everything in Essential, plus enhancement work: schema changes, harvester configuration, extension updates, theming, and security updates, with a quarterly roadmap review.
Multiple agencies publishing data, with sovereignty and data security requirements and accessibility compliance under formal audit. Everything in Standard, plus account management: roadmapping, cross-briefing, regular meetings, priority escalation, and dedicated engineering capacity.
Infrastructure provisioning and monitoring on AWS, security patch assessment and application, backup and restore verification, CKAN version currency, and support for incidents affecting portal availability.
Yes. Both platforms are supported under a single agreement, with one team, one escalation path and one invoice. Agencies running a CKAN data portal alongside a Drupal public site do not need to engage two vendors.
Yes. Portals frequently transition to us from another provider or from an in-house team that no longer has the capacity to maintain them.
Pricing is scoped per engagement because infrastructure footprint and complexity vary substantially between portals. Support tiers begin at 5 to 10 hours per month. We provide an indicative range in the first conversation.
Co-stewardship means our engineers don't just work on CKAN; we are inside the software, working on its maintenance and next phase. So patch assessment for your portal begins from a deep understanding rather than from investigation.
The CKAN Tech Team stops issuing security patches for it. The portal continues to run, but newly disclosed vulnerabilities affecting your version will not be fixed upstream. Every service tier includes planning upgrades before the support window closes.
Our pricing is scoped per engagement. Infrastructure, dataset volume, and integration complexity vary enough between portals that a published figure would mislead more often than it would help. Tell us which scenario resembles yours, and we will give you an indicative range in our first conversation.
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