A publication strategy is a plan for how your organization is going to deliver the right content to the right consumers in a way such that it is available when people need it and appropriately accessible. While any two organizations will have completely unique publication strategies, an effective strategy should address performance, reliability, and security.
Performance
It's important to address performance in your strategy because no one wants to use an application that doesn't load quickly enough. Some considerations that affect performance involve leveraging a cloud-houses SaaS environment, which provides a scalable, elastic venue for consumers. This is helpful because the available resources grow in response to demand- say to support a suddenly popular StoryMap. Make sure to consider proximity to your data, which can be a critical determinant of performance. Don't forget network bandwidth and speed, while may be less critical these days, but is still a factor in a disconnected environment.
Reliability
You can design the most incredible GIS application in the world, but if people can't access it, it won't make much of a difference. Think of reliability as your SLA (service level agreement), or an expectation (or sometimes a legal requirement) of when the system will be available depending on the needs of the users. Sometimes this is expressed in a percent, like 99.9%, which is ArcGIS Online's SLA. You can address reliability in many different ways, with load balancing, high availability, workload separation, security, and rapid machine recovery.
Security
Within the context of a publication strategy, security is about exposing the right content and capabilities to the right consumers. You don't want non-experts editing data, and you definitely don't want the public accessing your sensitive information. Security isn't just about differentiating between external and internal audiences. Individual
internal departments within an organization may require their own, separate environment to meet their individual security requirements. Consider using Single Sign On, so that your IT department manages the logins.
While your organization’s individual content publication strategy will likely encompass many other considerations that are relevant to your work, goals, and mission, it should always address the needs and expectations of the people in your organization and protect your internal system.
Publication Strategy is one of the Best Practices for Architecting the ArcGIS Platform document.
Special thanks to Jacob Boyle, for collaborating with me on this UC Spotlight Session!
