Prior to CWP, Government websites were hosted in the on premise infrastructure which was not scalable. Deployment was also largely a manual process. As such, turns around between deployment times were long. On top of it, schools tend to leverage on ungoverned open source websites, i.e. wordpress. These websites were not governed strictly and as such were occasionally compromised.

The key challenge was to design and implement a cloud platform that hosts more than 500 websites and at the same time streamline the operations to ensure our Government enjoys the economics of scale. So the ministries/agencies could shift their focus into enhancing the visitor user experience instead of focusing the hosting as well.

The governments need to ensure that the awarding-vendor can do provisioning of services + ensure security of the website hosted through various Quality Assurance (QA), Maintenance and Security Scanning Services through CWP as one single portal.

CWP is a new platform system for govtech. Various things are in it; from web hosting, content management, user accessibility management and security.

Xtremax proposed a Content Website Platform. This was a SaaS based solution where agencies pay a monthly subscription to subscribe to the platform. The platform is largely automated. It provides:

• Managed Services for 5 CMS, i.e. Sitefinity, Sitecore, SWIIIT, Wordpress and Sharepoint
• Platform Security
• Automated Self-Service Portal

Managed Services - 5 CMS

Upon the start of the subscription, the CMS websites will be provisioned and operational in minutes. The CMS has been designed to be auto-scalable and highly available. Patching of the CMS occurs at the image level and allows easy rollout of patches to hundreds of VM. The CMS are also monitored for performance and downtime.

Platform Security

The CMS are also protected by layers of security devices, i.e. Network Intrusion Prevention (NIPs) and Web Application Firewall (WAF). Alerts from these devices are monitored and evaluated by an operational security team.

Public facing websites are open to the internet. As such, all security vulnerabilities of supported CMS need to be patched in a timely manner. This is especially important for open source CMS like wordpress.

The security operations team monitors all security threats and ensures that they are mitigated in a timely manner.

Automated Self-Service Portal

Upon subscription, the websites will be provisioned with minutes. Code deployments to the platform were shortened from days to minutes. It also boasts a fleury of self service features like backup, rollback, log retrieval.

Since the automation processing of CWP, we have seen how development and updates of project have been iterating faster than before.

Lesser Manpower Needed

Removing the human factor to the deployment operation has also reduced the system engineer (SE) mistake up to zero (0). Because SEs are also human that may make mistake.

So, we made the automation of system, by creating the standard package template for deployment. The result is web contractor no longer needs to provide the step by step deployment guides to the SE. They can do the deployment by themselves, as long as the template is followed. As conclusion, this all template has been erase almost of all SEs mistakes.

Faster Turn Around Rate

In a review of the 2018 Q1 deployment; 96.5% of the deployments are completed within an hour of the request. This is an major improvement from the traditional Facility Management (FM) request that would have a typical SLA of 2-3 working days. The statistics have also shown that CWP is processing an average of 70 deployments on a weekday.

CWP was a highly successful project. Today, it hosts over 542 websites for over 41 agencies; Government agencies have become more agile in their website deployments and updates. Instead of waiting for 2-3 days to push out a deployment, code releases and changes happen in minutes.

Despite managing the hosting of open source websites like Wordpress, the platform has yet to experience any security breach. We continue to adhere to tight security governance and control in managing the platform.

View more information on CWP here.