VIC Government — static archive for VicGov agency websites

Overview

VicGov’s challenge

Many agencies are transitioning away from older proprietary platforms onto Victoria’s Single Digital Presence. However, often they’d like a backup or archive of the old site.

VicGov’s transformation

Salsa used QuantCDN to take a static ‘snapshot’ of the site. This is an exact replica of the site at a specific point in time. The static website on Quant provides a backup and helps agencies decommission expensive, legacy content management systems/platforms.

The outcomes

• Agencies have a cost-effective, exact replica of their old site as an archive
• Agencies have a backup of their old site, which provides peace of mind
• Traffic to the production site is reduced during development (automated migration scripts hit the static archive instead of the production site)

“The health.vic.gov.au website contains important information for the health sector, and is the Department of Health’s highly visible corporate web presence. When we migrated the website from Sitecore to the Single Digital Presence, it was important for the department to keep a backup of the website not only to meet corporate standards for data archiving and retention, but also as a very practical way of testing to ensure that the migration of 80,000+ content objects had been completed. Salsa used a secure, efficient and cost-effective tool that gives us peace of mind that we have an archive of the site available to us at any time.”

Senior ICT Project Manager, Department of Health

Full case study

VicGov’s challenge — migrating/rebuilding large sites with no backup

Many agencies are transitioning off older, proprietary platforms and onto Victoria’s Single Digital Presence. While moving to the whole-of-government platform provides many benefits, for larger websites and agencies a backup copy of their old site provides peace of mind. This is especially the case if content is being deleted or updated. Keeping the old site running on the old proprietary system (but not live) is too expensive just for an archival copy. And taking backup files to potentially be restored later also has many challenges and drawbacks.

Two recent examples from Salsa’s project work are health.vic.gov.au and Seniors Online, which were both SiteCore sites. The Health site had 110 different features identified for rebuilding on SDP, and over 80,000 content objects (pages, documents and components) for migration. Similarly, Seniors Online had more than 4000 media items that needed to be migrated along with 100s of content pages. For both projects many features and content pages were deemed out of scope for migration/rebuild. This provided a strong incentive for archival copies of the sites.

VicGov’s transformation — static copies of their websites with QuantCDN

During the health.vic.gov.au build, the day before the content was migrated to the new SDP production site Salsa organised a QuantCDN ‘snapshot’. Quant crawls the site’s frontend and creates a static copy of the site that isn’t linked to any backend content management system (CMS). This provides a cost-effective backup and helps government agencies decommission expensive, legacy CMSs that often have high ongoing licensing fees. The Quant snapshot was done overnight, and spot checks were performed to ensure the static snapshot was a replica of the old site.

Similarly, before the Seniors Online migration to production, we also created a QuantCDN snapshot of the site. This provides Seniors Online with an archival copy of their site at a specific moment in time.

The outcomes — a low-cost archival site

• Agencies have a cost-effective, exact replica of their old site for archival purposes
• Agencies have a backup of their old site, which provides peace of mind
• During the development phase, the migration scripts hit the archived site and not the production site — thus reducing the traffic on the production site

About the agencies

Victoria’s Department of Health focuses on policies and services for Victorians’ health and wellbeing. It covers health, mental health, ambulance services and ageing. It’s also the lead agency in Victoria’s COVID-19 response. DH is responsible for many websites across these areas, including health.vic.gov.au.

Seniors Online is a website designed to provide information dedicated to seniors. The site covers information on the Seniors Card program, festivals and events for seniors, news, photo galleries, community contacts, and more.