Azure Delivering Scale During Unprecedented Times

Cloud Technology in the Public Sector

It is imperative Public Sector organisations ensure governance around security, data protection and compliance with ongoing legislation when tendering for website solutions. Azure delivers for regulated industries and for those in Public Sector. I‑Finity is a Microsoft Silver Partner who understands the importance of keeping software applications fully protected. For its public sector customers all websites and databases are fully compliant and protected with using a secure and trusted cloud platform with Azure.

City Councils News Website

As specialists in cloud technology I‑Finity has been working with Microsoft Azure for many years. With the use of Microsoft Azure, the City Councils news website is kept secure, is easily scaled, and provides high availability. All data for the website remains within the UK at all times as Azure enables us to control where data needs to reside.

Providing a fully managed hosted solution that I‑Finity monitors, leaves the councils team to focus on publishing daily website news for its residents, businesses and the wider community.

Azure's Security by Design Approach

• It embeds security, privacy and compliance into its development methodology which ensures full compliance with GDPR, PCI and ISO requirements.
• All data including back up data remains in the UK at all times.
• Complete control over where data is located, who can access it, and on what terms.
• Azure conforms to both local and global standards with government specific compliance for UK Government-Cloud services classification v6.
• For data in transit, Azure uses industry-standard transport protocols such as TLS 1.2+
• Ability to define backup policies in Azure to meet exact requirements and backup data is secured with data encryption.
• With the use of automatic backups and point-in-time restore the database is protected from accidental data corruption or deletion.

The Results

Council’s news website was a high traffic website but there was significantly increased demand during key Covid-19 updates that took place in the general media. The demand on the site was appearing all at once in several peaks versus being dispersed over a day like it would have been pre-covid time. These high levels of demand, in a very short time period, were successfully supported with Microsoft’s cloud technology. I-Finity’s deep technical expertise with the Azure platform enabled the optimal implementation to ensure scalability and high availability. Proactive monitoring was in place to ensure the right decisions were being made at the right times.

Stability, scalability and reliability was delivered by using Azure:

• Successfully scaled to deal with the unpredicted peaks:
  • 250% growth in users in one month and a 560% growth in another month (in comparison to previous year’s monthly users)
• Website remained stable, operational and performant whilst coping with the significant increases in demand

Scalable cloud technology supported a period of unprecedented times allowing the Council’s news team to remain connected with its residents, businesses and communities at a time when everyone was consuming news to better understand Covid-19.