solutions:
DOWNLOAD UNITED STATES CENSUS 2010 CASE STUDY
- Maintained site availability and delivered a media rich site experience to 300 million people.
- Handled 40X increase in traffic without adding any infrastructure.
- Over 95% reduction in hits to the data center during peak traffic.
- Over 4X improvement in traffic during peak traffic.
- Protection from distributed DDoS attacks.
The U.S. Census counts every resident in the United States every ten years as mandated by the Constitution. On January 4, 2010, at The Today Show, the U.S. Census’ Once-A-Decade Ceremony launched from New York City's Rockefeller Center, and featured an 18-wheeler truck to kick off their cross-country road tour. With the media attention, and a media rich site targeted towards 300 million people, Census expected a significant increase in traffic on the 2010 site. Census also released their TV Commercial during the Super Bowl which was expected to drive traffic towards the site. Census was faced with the decision of building out their own infrastructure to support unknown traffic levels or leveraging a cloud solution provider, such as Akamai, to provide scalability for traffic spikes, significant offload, security and performance benefits.
The Census Bureau leveraged Akamai's Cloud solution to handle their traffic spikes during the Census 2010 campaign. While providing on-demand scalability to handle the surge in traffic, Akamai also provided significant performance improvements and offloaded over 95% of the hits from the Census Data Center. By law, the Census needs to be completed as scheduled. There was not room to slip the schedule to the right. The Akamai Cloud allowed this critical program complete on time and under budget.
Akamai provided a 4X improvement in performance of the Census 2010 site. Akamai's globally-distributed platform delivers Web content and applications from Edge servers that are closer to Census end-users. Akamai's dynamic mapping system is used to direct end-user requests to the optimal Edge server depending on their location on the Internet and load across the Akamai platform. Census 2010 site leveraged Akamai's In the Cloud Security (ITC) services to mitigate the threat from any distributed denial of service attacks while keeping the site 100% available for the citizens. Akamai's globally distributed platform is uniquely positioned to absorb distributed denial of service attacks.
"Using the CDN was a huge positive lesson. I don’t know if it could have gone any better."
-Brian McGrath, CIO, Census Bureau on Network World
