Case Study: U.S. Census Bureau achieves 40x traffic scalability, 4x faster performance and DDoS protection with Akamai Technologies

Akamai's Cloud Solution for U.S. Census Bureau

The U.S. Census Bureau faced a high‑risk traffic and security challenge during the 2010 decennial count: a media‑rich site aimed at 300 million people plus promotion on The Today Show and the Super Bowl risked massive, unpredictable spikes and possible DDoS attacks that could hurt participation if the site slowed or went down. Building out sufficient infrastructure internally would have been costly and slow.

The Bureau contracted Akamai’s cloud CDN and edge services to provide on‑demand scalability, security and performance. Akamai served roughly 85% of content from the edge, offloaded over 95% of hits from the data center, handled a 40× traffic increase, improved web performance more than 4×, maintained site availability for the campaign and provided DDoS protection.

U.S. Census Bureau

Brian McGrath

U.S. Census Bureau