Case Study: Washington State Department of Transportation achieves uninterrupted public website availability during massive traffic spikes with Citrix NetScaler

State agency uses Citrix NetScaler to ensure availability of public website

The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), which maintains a public website for road conditions and ferry reservations, faced massive traffic spikes—typically 75,000 daily visitors but approaching a million during snow events—that overwhelmed its legacy Cisco load balancer and caused site outages at critical times.

WSDOT deployed Citrix NetScaler Platinum to provide built-in load balancing, security, and compression; capacity immediately improved, compression cut bandwidth by about 40%, and the public site stopped going down. NetScaler also enabled transparent SharePoint migrations, supported additional services (Exchange, Lync, intranet) and simple redirects to a dot‑com advertising site, improving availability, user experience, and generating new revenue.

Washington State Department of Transportation

Aaron Hutchinson

Web Master, Infrastructure Server Support Team