Charles Sturt University (CSU) has occupied the top spot two months running for the availability of its public web service, according to an independent study, the Australian Universities IT Performance Benchmark Report.

 

The study measured the IT performance of Australia’s 38 universities in September, with Charles Sturt University recording a 100 per cent availabiity score for its public web service. Over the past 12 months, the service has been available 99.91 per cent of the time, according to the ongoing study.

 

Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Administration) at CSU, Professor Lyn Gorman said the ranking was a great result.

 

“It is further evidence that Charles Sturt University’s information technology architecture strategy not only meets the University’s requirements, but exceeds the results from all other Australian universities. We’ve reached a level of excellence in public web service availability and will continue our solid work to maintain it,” she said.

 

The report was based on data collected every 10 minutes throughout the month to check if the top page of the Charles Sturt University website could be retrieved within 10 seconds. The CSU site recorded no down time in August and September.

 

Professor Gorman said, “We’ve been able to reach this exemplary level of performance increasingly over the past 12 to 18 months as we’re realising the benefits of new IT infrastructure. This multi-layered infrastructure supports the integrated online learning environment, Interact, as well as our finance and job applications systems. These are critical systems which we need to ensure are available all day, every day, year round.”

 

“We’re constantly monitoring our public web service (as well as other IT services) to ensure we’re meeting the needs of the University community.”

 

The public web service is the digital face of Charles Sturt University and is made up of some 180,000 HTML pages.

 

Over the past six weeks, the University’s public web server has reported more than 605,000 visits (Google analytics). There have been more than 2.7 million page visits during that period.