OIST Scales Team and Meets Demand Surge with Pantheon & Managed Updates

Why Pantheon

In the spring of 2020, a COVID-19 research project from one of OIST’s professors was published online; soon after, scientists from around the world were flocking to the OIST website. With Pantheon’s Global CDN, the majority of the massive traffic spike was directed to cached content instead of OIST’s servers. “We didn’t even notice that we had a nearly 650% increase in traffic. We didn’t have to drop everything to deal with the sudden demand, freeing us to focus on promoting OIST’s contributions to Okinawa’s response to the pandemic.” says Micheal.

We didn’t even notice that we had a nearly 650% increase in traffic. We didn’t have to drop everything to deal with the sudden demand, freeing us to focus on promoting OIST’s contributions to Okinawa’s response to the pandemic.

—Micheal Cooper, Manager, Digital Content, Brand, and Design

Results

By adopting Pantheon, the communications team was able to reclaim its resources from managing CMS updates, augment its team with a dedicated Customer Success Manager, accelerate its collaboration and time to delivery for new features, and scale for a massive traffic spike.

In leveraging Managed Updates, OIST has successfully redeployed its front-end development resources to focus on impact, instead of maintenance and credibility. According to Chris, “With such a small team — just keeping Drupal secure and up to date was so taxing that it was impossible to make a lot of progress, so Managed Updates has enabled us to spend more time on development.

Using Diamond Support, the team was able to spend less time fielding and remediating support issues. This added capacity came at a particularly good time, because managing website operations was begin moved to the communications team.

Managed Updates has enabled us to spend more time on development -- with such a small team just keeping Drupal secure and up to date was so taxing that it was impossible to really make a lot of progress.

—Chris Wu, Senior Web Developer

Opinions expressed here are those of OIST staff. The OIST Graduate University does not sponsor or endorse the products or services described.