The challenge
ICAEW engages with their students and members at each
stage of their careers. ICAEW trains, supports and guides
them in their careers with the aim of enabling them to grow
and advise businesses. This relies upon a dependable online
infrastructure that can handle high peak-time traffic. Before
Claranet, the ICAEW's infrastructure was not always able
to handle this workload.
ICAEW's need for a robust online service became clear five
times a year when they released the ACA exam results. These
results are posted on the site for students to view. At the time
of release ICAEW's site sees a large spike in traffic, with up
to 5,000 students trying to access their accounts to view their
results at once.
As Bill Wilson at ICAEW explains, this caused significant
problems: "Our site used to find it very strenuous to handle
traffic spikes around the time of ACA results. Eager students
would repeatedly hit the refresh button to load their grades,
which created up to 500 times the access requests than were
made in non-peak times. With up to 150,000 potential users
for the site at any one time, we wanted to provide a service
where our students could get their results and get
on with making decisions on the next steps of their careers.
A flexible and reliable infrastructure solution was needed
in order to meet our users' demands."
ICAEW
ICAEW is a world leading professional member
organisation that promotes, develops and supports
over 144,000 chartered accountants worldwide. Its ACA
qualification to train chartered accountants is respected
and valued worldwide.
Much of ICAEW's engagement with its members and
students is done online. Its digital channels are therefore
vital, enabling ICAEW to reach out to their customers.
Given how important its online presence is, ICAEW called
upon Claranet to re-architect their website with Claranet's
scalable Managed Hosting solution.
Claranet case study ICAEW
Claranet enables ICAEW
to quickly respond to web traffic
Key services:
•
Managed Hosting
•
Corporate Website Hosting
•
Web Acceleration and
DoS Protection