Case Study: Florida Division of Emergency Management keeps website online during COVID-19 traffic surge with Optimizely

Florida Division of Emergency Management - Customer Case Study

The Florida Division of Emergency Management (FL DEM) — charged with delivering critical information to residents — saw traffic to floridadisaster.org double overnight after the governor directed the public to the site as a single COVID‑19 information source. Their existing on‑premises infrastructure couldn’t handle the surge, causing latency and crashes, and the agency urgently needed a cloud solution to keep the site online.

FL DEM, working with Optimizely and partners Blend Interactive and AAJ/OZ, implemented the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (Content Cloud) on Microsoft Azure, executing the agreement in under three days and provisioning the environment within 24 hours. The cloud‑first solution delivered high availability, better performance, seamless integration with existing systems, and capacity to absorb future traffic spikes (including hurricane season), keeping the site reliable when it mattered most.

Florida Division of Emergency Management