Open Access College

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

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 330 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.