Case Study: Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) achieves a reliable, high-performance web presence with Akamai Technologies

Akamai helps the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) ensure a reliable web presence

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which provides conservation guidance and maintains one of the nation’s largest soil, water and climate data repositories for farmers and landowners, serves about 1.4 million visitors monthly. After migrating hosting to the USDA’s National Information Technology Center (NITC) and moving to a new CMS, the agency faced increased security and IPv6 compliance requirements and experienced instability that threatened site availability and global performance.

By leveraging Akamai services available through NITC—including Dynamic Site Accelerator and Site Failover to NetStorage—NRCS delivered content from a globally distributed CDN without adding infrastructure. The result was reliable uptime during maintenance, the flexibility to add new features, a roughly 93% reduction in bandwidth use and nearly a 600% average improvement in website performance.

Natural Resources Conservation Service

George Couch

Web Project Manager