Case Study: Washington Health Benefit Exchange achieves near-100% uptime, fast performance, and robust security with Akamai Technologies

Washington Healthplanfinder™ Stays Fast, Available, and Secure with Akamai Solutions

Washington Health Benefit Exchange operates Washington Healthplanfinder™, the state’s online marketplace for comparing and enrolling in health insurance. During the annual open enrollment period the site faces massive, unpredictable traffic spikes well above its normal 100,000–200,000 monthly visits, and the Exchange needed to ensure high performance, continuous availability, and strong protection against malicious traffic and DDoS attacks.

Akamai implemented DSA Secure, Kona Site Defender, Visitor Prioritization Cloudlet, Fast DNS and professional services to scale, secure, and accelerate the site. Within 60 days Akamai offloaded 70% of web content delivery and 100% of DNS requests; the marketplace achieved 99.99% availability, delivered pages in under 2 seconds for over 75% of users, and gained robust attack protection and real-time traffic visibility while maintaining prioritized access during maintenance.

Washington Health Benefit Exchange