Open Access College

Open Access College keeps their website online and secure with Cloudflare’s CDN and DDoS Mitigation

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Open Access College (OAC) is a public school in South Australia. It is the only public distance education school for families in the South Australian region. Students enroll for a variety of reasons including isolation, distance, health, travel and elite sports as well as to gain access to single subjects not available in their school.

Open Access College’s Challenge: Remote Students and Traffic Spikes

With remote students OAC is faced with the difficult task of ensuring a consistent, pleasant web experience for every student, regardless of where they are located. Furthermore, OAC faced the challenge of spikes in traffic that occurred at the beginning of the school year and during assignment deadlines. These traffic spikes have the potential to knock OAC’s site offline at a time the students need it most— at the beginning of the year when they’re enrolling in new classes and when they’re submitting assignments. OAC recognized that they could solve for the traffic spike issue by buying expensive hardware or cloud infrastructure, but this investment would go underutilized and unused while OAC experienced normal traffic.

Open Access College’s Solution: Easy, Integrated Performance and Security

OAC found Cloudflare to be the perfect solution to their challenge at an affordable price. Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network caches and serves OAC’s web content from data centers in over 310 cities around the world. This distribution ensures a high performing site for all of OAC’s students. Cloudflare’s CDN and automated DDoS mitigation also ensure that OAC’s site is readily available—because Cloudflare handles more than 45% of OAC’s bandwidth, their infrastructure is never overloaded and, in fact, OAC needs 48% fewer servers to run their site.

Open Access College
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Key Results

Reduced bandwidth consumption by more than 45%

48% fewer servers needed

DDoS Mitigation keeps Open Access College's website online preventing significant driver loss of access and allows continuous self service via the website

Cloudflare’s solution is great. Their global scale meets our needs to serve all of our remote students, while the integrated performance and security offering speeds up our site, while ensuring it’s protected. Plus, because it’s DNS based, it’s easy to setup and simple to use.

Kenneth Burgoyne
Data and Infrastructure Manager