destra delivers on its promise that every one of NSW’s 65,000 HSC students will be able to access their results online without any delays or disruptions.
destra Business, a division of destra Corporation Limited (ASX:DES) (destra), delivered on its promise to the Board of Studies that HSC students would read their results via the web without delay or disruption earlier this month.
From 6.00 am Friday, 16 December, more than 65,000 NSW HSC students had access to their results from the Board of Studies (BoS) website using a secure log-in.
“Between 6.00 and 6.30 am on the 16th of December, we had more than 11,000 students accessing our site to download their results,” said Lyndon Sharp, Board of Studies Manager of Information Services.
“This is a record for us and our systems performed perfectly. By 9.00am we had delivered just under 30,000 results without a hitch. We were delighted, but the most important thing was that the students experienced the quality of service we demand of ourselves,” he said.
Underpinning the Board of Studies successful delivery of results from its website is destra Business, which has worked with the Board for the last five years. destra Business provides the Board with all its website infrastructure connectivity needs. The Board and destra work to ensure full redundancy and security. For example, the Board hosts its primary server at a different destra Business data centre to that of the back up server – allowing for the highest level of security, redundancy and disaster recovery.
“A few weeks before the actual results, we have an even higher level of activity on our website where we offer self-testing multiple choice practice quizzes for both HSC and School Certificate (Year 10) students,” Mr Sharp said. “The Test Yourself service averages 8,000 tests per hour and the interactive nature of the tests is even more demanding than the one way download of HSC results.”
To support the Board on these occasions, when the scale of traffic is unrelenting, destra Business increases the bandwidth capacity to the maximum and ensures full redundancy for the website should any points of failure arise. Additionally, the Board had the services of a senior support engineer, allocated solely to the Board for the critical 48 hour period around the release of HSC results.
“We would have to say, the system stood tall under the pressure on the 16th and we are impressed with the robust service we experience and the attention to detail delivered by destra Business at a time when we cannot afford to let the students down,” concluded Mr Sharp.