Key Impacts
- Reduced infrastructure costs by 40%
- Handled 16.6 million hits and delivered 73.5 GB of data during peak traffic
- Eliminated site crashes
- Improved student satisfaction
- Gained confidence to deliver richer content
Certified General Accountants Association of Canada (CGA-Canada) delivers a Program of Professional studies via a distance education format to 24,000 students in Canada, China, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean Islands. In 2003, CGA-Canada and its regional and territorial affiliates decided to transition from a CD-based program to an online program, developing a delivery platform for education content called edNET. The platform enables students to interact with course material and each other, delivering a mix of static and multimedia information. Due to the geographical diversity of the student population and increasingly bandwidth-intensive content, it became clear that CGA-Canada needed to increase redundancy, availability and throughput to ensure students got the most benefit from their commitment to online learning.
As a non-profit, CGA-Canada determined that Akamai was clearly the best value in terms of cost vs. performance. In a pilot deployment of Akamai EdgeSuite and Akamai EdgeComputing, up to 3,800 students were served at any given time and CGA-Canada’s site easily supported an average of 3.5 million hits while delivering 14 GB of data. Rolling out the solution on a broader scale increased performance even more—while enabling CGA-Canada to reduce its infrastructure and staffing expenses by almost 40% in the first three years. Another benefit? With Akamai serving its Web content, CGA-Canada has been able to enrich its offerings and attract even more students—a success for online education, powered by Akamai.
"With Akamai, we are able to deliver a high-quality education worldwide, no matter how much our student body increases."
—Gabriel Vitus, Director of Information Technology, CGA-Canada
