Migration is where strategy meets operational risk

A CMS migration is not simply a verdict on one platform over another. It is a high-stakes test of whether a business can change the machinery behind its digital experience without sacrificing momentum, search visibility, editorial control or customer trust. Sun International’s move from Adobe AEM to Umbraco shows what that test demands in practice, and why the decisions made before migration can matter as much as the technology chosen.

CMS Migration Is No Longer Just an IT Project

Websites now function as operating infrastructure, carrying bookings, loyalty journeys, customer service, lead generation, campaigns, brand content and analytics. CMS migration is therefore a cross-functional business decision involving technology, marketing, SEO, customer experience and commercial teams, not simply a technical clean-up exercise.

The wider CMS and DXP market reinforces the point. Forrester positions CMS selection as a decision for digital and technology leaders evaluating vendors and partner ecosystems, while Gartner Peer Insights reflects the range of capabilities buyers now assess across web content management and digital experience platforms. Taken together, these sources point to platform choice becoming an increasingly cross-functional decision. Platform choice cannot be separated from the people, processes and governance needed to operate it.

Sun International’s move from Adobe AEM to Umbraco should be understood in that context. AEM remains an established enterprise DXP. The issue was not whether it was inherently better or worse, but whether a different platform and delivery model could better support Sun International’s governance, marketing and customer-journey requirements.

AI raises the stakes further. As CMS and DXP vendors add AI-assisted authoring, personalisation, search and workflow capabilities, their effectiveness increasingly depends on well-modelled, governed and reusable content. Weak foundations do not disappear with automation; they can produce inconsistency faster and at greater scale.

The risks are measurable, not theoretical

Google’s site-move guidance recommends careful planning, URL mapping, redirects, testing and post-launch monitoring. It also warns that rankings may fluctuate while Google recrawls and reindexes a changed site. In practical terms, a poorly managed migration can make important pages harder to find, interrupt customer journeys and undermine digital revenue at the moment a new platform is meant to improve performance.

That guidance translates into a simple principle: know what customers and search engines rely on before anything moves. Priority URLs, metadata, internal links, integrations and rollback plans all need to be tested so the new platform does not disrupt discoverability, transactions or service continuity. For Sun International, these measures protected the digital journeys on which the business and its customers depended.

Umbraco’s own documentation reinforces the need to examine how content, custom functionality and third-party tools will behave in the new environment. Migration risk rarely arrives as one dramatic failure. More often, it emerges through a series of overlooked dependencies that only become visible late in the project.

What the Sun International migration demonstrates

Sun International shows how those dependencies multiply across a complex digital estate. Its websites support hospitality, gaming, entertainment, loyalty and destination content, with journeys spanning brand discovery, booking intent, customer support and member self-service.

The project replaced Adobe AEM with an Umbraco-based platform designed to improve content governance, reuse and marketing self-service. Umbraco Cloud manages the content layer, while a Next.js frontend hosted on Azure supports the customer-facing experience. The same ecosystem also supports Sun Vacation Club member accounts and online timeshare accommodation bookings, showing how the migration extended beyond a website redesign into customer-facing services.

Why Umbraco was the right fit for Sun International

For Sun International, Umbraco gave marketing teams a more practical way to manage content while fitting the organisation’s Microsoft technology environment and modern frontend approach. The result was greater day-to-day autonomy for marketing, alongside a more maintainable foundation for integrations and future development.

That does not make Umbraco the automatic choice for every enterprise but for Sun International it offered the right balance of control, flexibility and operational simplicity. The right CMS still depends on budget, internal skills, content complexity, governance maturity, integration requirements and the capacity to operate it effectively after launch.

Migration Is a Strategic Reset, Not a Technology Replacement

Sun International’s move from Adobe AEM to Umbraco is significant because it demonstrates what organisations can achieve when replatforming is approached as a business transformation rather than a technology project.

The programme simplified the digital estate, strengthened governance and gave marketing teams greater autonomy, while creating a foundation designed to support changing customer journeys.

The resulting Umbraco platform supports multiple sites and nearly 2,000 content items, structured through approximately 240 document types spanning page templates, reusable components and content blocks. But the more important point is what sat behind those numbers: audit discipline, migration judgement, technical architecture, SEO awareness and a partner able to translate platform change into operational value.