Content Delivery Network for External Website

Tender description

Content Delivery Network for External Website. Background. The Health Protection Agency website www.hpa.org.uk attracts over 250,000 visitors per month. It is a trusted resource within among health and other professionals for the provision of timely, accurate, health protection information and advice & guidance, which is frequently put to use in direct support of frontline health protection interventions, particularly in outbreaks and incidents. In addition, the general public use the site to gather key information about infections, radiation and chemicals & poison topics. The agency site is provisioned through a content management system and a content delivery network (CDN). The HPA primary servers are hosted at Colindale (known as the origin servers) and the CDN provides offsite servers across thousands of international locations to deliver the content. The CDN provides a resilient offsite cached version of the website to ensure availability of the site to users and to cope with high load volumes (during swine flu, monthly visits peaked at 700,000 in July, with a lot of traffic during key points giving a surge in use). The CDN provides servers that will cope with surges and loads as well as security software to deal with malicious attacks from viruses etc. Statement of Need. The website is a critical and primary interface with professionals in the field of health protection, other key stakeholders and the public. The agency aims to provide these key audiences with easy and rapid access to the information they need. This is underpinned as part of the corporate plan in the high level priority.