New Zealand Cricket bolsters website capability

New Zealand Cricket bolsters website capability with Microsoft cloud for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015

BLACKCAPS website migrates to Microsoft Azure to manage high fan traffic

AUCKLAND, 22 December 2014, New Zealand – Ahead of the ICC Cricket World Cup in February 2015, New Zealand Cricket today announced that it has migrated its website to Microsoft’s cloud service Azure in order to prepare for the extreme traffic peaks expected around significant games.

New Zealand Cricket is the managing body governing cricket in New Zealand – from the BLACKCAPS to regional and grassroots levels – and is anticipating the highest website traffic peaks ever in the coming months with excitement already swelling resulting in a substantial increase in base traffic.

As one of the first companies to take advantage of the new Australia-based Azure data centres – which were added to the Microsoft global cloud network last month – New Zealand Cricket needed a future-proof solution, with web traffic increasing consistently year on year, partly due to the introduction of live scoring.

The Black Caps website is the only New Zealand website to provide a live scoring feature, providing ball-by-ball updates for all domestic and international matches. A very stable and secure platform is required to cope with up to 20,000 international fans visiting the site at any given time, for the live scoring statistics for as many as eight matches a day and over 250 matches each season.

Gus Pickering, Technical Director of NV Interactive, who has managed the New Zealand Cricket website for the past six years, explained that the move to the cloud will give the site the flexibility to be able to handle these extreme fluctuating workloads.

“Blackcaps.co.nz traffic has increased 152 per cent already this season largely due to a big rise in mobile usage, with mobile views increasing 221 per cent in 2014,” said Pickering.

“Where we used to have to anticipate the traffic we thought we would encounter for each game and scale up and down manually, by hosting the site in the cloud it will now automatically scale up as needed. This represents a sea change in the way we will work as Microsoft Azure is essentially freeing up our team to focus on adding strategic value, while Microsoft manages what’s under the hood.”

Richard Irvine, Online and Communications Advisor for New Zealand Cricket, said they could now relax knowing they will be able to handle huge spikes in traffic this season.

“We're now secure in the knowledge that in a World Cup year when we're expecting more traffic than ever before, blackcaps.co.nz is ready to go," said Irvine.

“Moving blackcaps.co.nz to the Azure system was painless for us. It went so seamlessly that I feel a bit guilty for not having to do anything.”

The Microsoft Azure platform offers a wealth of cloud services including infrastructure services, data management, web applications, development and virtual machine testing, storage, backup, and recovery services.

The solution for NZ Cricket includes Azure Websites, Azure Storage, Virtual Machines, SQL Databases, Notification Hubs and Operational Insights.

For more information on how to access the benefits of the new Microsoft Azure data centres, visit http://azure.microsoft.com/

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