Key Impacts
- Removed risks associated with common Web infrastructure, ensuring continuous critical communications such as email
- Enabled Department of Defense to handle record traffic to its sites (served over 4 million requests in 3.5 days)
- Enabled uninterrupted Web site updates, ensuring timely release of the latest news
- Successfully delivered live streamed concert with little preparation
- Provided more stable and reliable bandwidth capacity
The Department of Defense (DoD) runs a variety of sites geared toward different constituents and topics, with DefenseLINK (www.defenselink.mil) serving as the official DoD Web site and the starting point for finding U.S. military information online. Many other high level DoD sites and several high volume electronic mailing lists are based on a single infrastructure and thus traffic to one site can impact the performance, reliability, and availability of all other sites. The war in Iraq posed interesting opportunities and challenges for the DoD Web sites; for the first time in history, a war could be followed on the Internet. In just the first few days of the war, traffic to many DoD sites increased by five to six times, impacting performance and compromising availability.
Realizing its duty to deliver information to the public, the Office of the Secretary of Defense took proactive measures to ensure that its sites could handle any amount of traffic. The DoD turned to Akamai Technologies to extend the capabilities of its Web infrastructure and enable the successful global delivery of all Web content, including video, no matter how large the audience. By using Akamai EdgeSuite, the DoD could leverage Akamai’s globally distributed computing platform to deliver applications and Web content quickly and reliably. The result? DoD is able to stream multimedia applications to audiences of any size, at any time, and be assured of a reliably streamed event, keeping a nation and the world informed and up-to-date.
"From a strategic point of view, Akamai allows us to consider doing things on our Web sites that were not possible before—we no longer have to worry about distribution capacity and can spend less time responding to the impact of Denial of Service attacks. Akamai’s EdgeSuite service has had a huge impact on the quality of service the DoD sites provide to the general public."
—Terry Davis, Manager, Office of The Secretary of Defense, Public Web Program
