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Edgar Allan developed Wes as a Webflow Enterprise solution for businesses in highly regulated industries. If your business lies in healthcare, finance, higher education or the like and you’re looking to achieve GDPR compliance and data residency, bolster information security, and streamline data deployment to websites, Wes is the answer.
But what are the specifics of Wes’ use cases and how does it solve compliance, deployment, and security-related issues? Let’s dive into five of the biggest game-changers the product brings to the table.
Wes makes it possible to implement a brand portal with the flexibility of Webflow and the security of SSO and server-side authentication with platforms like Octa or Auth0.
This helps ensure that any information you need to keep internal will stay that way. For example, imagine you’re a venture capital firm and want to create a secure space for founders where they can log into and keep track of their portfolios, or you work in healthcare and need a secure place where patients can view confidential information.
The process involves you authoring your site in Webflow and registering on Wes for server-side rendering, then, instead of publishing to a live destination, the site is submitted to GitHub for a code repo. From that point, we can implement a server-side injection of an application we build using Ruby on Rails, PHP, or React that handles SSO in the Webflow environment. From there, it’s deployed like a typical application to be hosted by your server.
An example of this we’ve seen would be using EC2 as the application server, S3 for static file hosting, and CloudFront to route traffic. The user then logs into the application with their single sign-on to access any gated content securely.
The synergy between Webflow and Wes opens up a world of possibilities for data management, deployment efficiency, and secure brand portals. By leveraging this powerful combination, businesses can streamline their processes, maintain data residency compliance, and enhance user experiences.
Whether it's deploying content to multiple destinations, ensuring data security, or creating secure brand portals, using Wes in combination with Webflow empowers businesses to achieve their digital goals with confidence and ease.
Before Wes came along, working with massive amounts of data inside Webflow to create a dealer portal with hundreds of thousands of inventory items proved to be unwieldy.
But with Wes on our side, we can use that data and get a sample of it from your API to design a really good customer experience. Then, we use Wes to render out the experience we’ve created on a private server, commit it to GitHub, pull in all the rest of the data from your API, and seamlessly deploy it into a live environment.
Wes enables multiple teams across a business to fully control and maintain their own Webflow authoring environment without having to worry about making mistakes that impact an entire site.
We can assign different business units or brand groups working within the same company to specific instances of a Webflow environment, effectively gating the updates and changes they can make to only the instances they have permission to update. Wes brings together all of those Webflow instances and sitemaps through server-side rendering to present a unified experience to users. It’s great for SEO and data residency purposes while eliminating the need for a reverse proxy.
Wes also enables the inverse of the previous point, making it possible to have one content- and experience-authoring location, like Webflow, and publish specific pages to multiple private servers.
This works by creating a digital experience in Webflow, then identifying, collecting, and organizing individual pages to a custom, dynamic site map with Wes, and then targeting out the deployment of each collection of pages to a set of specific locations.
A real-life use case for this would be if you’re running a marketing team and have multiple locations to which you want to publish specific website content or pages. Say, for example, a microsite, a main domain, and a regionalized site. You can author all that content from one location — Webflow — and dictate how and where you want that content to be published via Wes.
Let’s say you want to work in Webflow but need to have your site living privately within your infrastructure for security reasons or in the interest of being GDPR compliant. With Wes, you’d author your site in Webflow and use its CMS, then register your site on Wes, which would then do a server-side rendering. All you’d have to do is pick the site’s final destination, whether that be AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Webflow itself.
Using Wes in this way makes achieving data residency much simpler, especially if your company operates in locations like China, the UAE, or certain parts of Europe, where GDPR compliance is a legal must.
Looking for a more ownable, easy-to-use platform to host your company’s website — and the security, compliance, and deployment process you need? Let’s talk.
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