Glow is Scotland’s national digital learning platform, managed by Education Scotland. The platform provides a free website and blog service for education institutions across Scotland, giving them a safe and easy way to create web content. With 33 WordPress multisites, and around 150,000 individual sites it’s a huge, complex platform.
Education Scotland needed a new supplier who could modernise, maintain and continually improve the Glow platform. The challenge? Do all of this while keeping costs under control, and keeping the 150,000 sites running smoothly for Scotland’s educators and students.
The details
- Client: Education Scotland
- Project type: Platform support and infrastructure management
- Software: WordPress Multisite on AWSIndustry: Education / public sector
Services delivered
- Migration
- Hosting
- Ongoing support
- Continual improvement
The challenges
Managing huge amounts of content
With 33 WordPress multisites, around 150,000 blogs, 40 code repositories, 28TB of media storage and three test environments, the sheer scale of the platform presented some real challenges:
- Keeping on top of inactive blogs, content and plugins. The compound effect of these could rapidly increase storage costs and security risks.
- Any updates or migrations would take far longer and potentially have far wider-reaching implications than on a standard website.
- Updates and changes had to be done in such a way that they wouldn’t impact the whole network.
Maintaining security and safety
The platform needed major improvements: better resilience, disaster recovery, efficiency and performance. As the platform was being used by children, safety was a huge concern. With thousands of potential entry points, the attack surface was massive, and one compromised site could potentially bring down the entire platform. Reducing the risk of that happening was essential.
Keeping the service live
With over 350,000 teachers and students depending on it daily, there was no room for downtime.
Moving a platform of this scale and complexity while keeping it live would require a sophisticated hosting set up, tight security and meticulous planning. Critical safeguarding features like the “report a concern” facility had to stay available throughout, and any content migration had to happen without disrupting teaching and learning.
Finding cost efficiencies
With such a large platform, costs could easily spiral. We also needed to work out where costs could be reduced without compromising performance or reliability.
How we solved Education Scotland’s challenges
The tech
Optimising WordPress for security and control
The platform used WordPress multisite. It’s well-suited for a platform of this scale but also a common target for hackers. And the risk was that one compromised site could give attackers access to the entire network.
We started by reviewing all the plugins, including over 40 custom ones, to make sure they were secure. Then we locked down what users could access, and created a core set of approved themes and plugins that we’d tested and knew were safe.
But we also needed to make sure the platform wasn’t too restrictive. So users can submit feature requests for new functionality. If appropriate, we test and roll these out across the network, like the ePortfolio plugin that lets students present their work. This balance keeps the platform secure while still being responsive to what educators need.
Robust AWS hosting
The platform was already on AWS but wasn’t using its capabilities properly. Tweaks weren’t going to be sufficient, we needed to completely redesign the infrastructure.
We moved media storage to S3 buckets for better scalability and cost efficiency, and implemented auto-scaling so the platform only used (and paid for) what it needed.
This gives Education Scotland enterprise-level infrastructure with better resilience and disaster recovery, improved security, and regular optimisation to maintain high availability.
The process
Working within ITIL processes
Education Scotland uses ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) to manage how Glow is delivered. ITIL is a framework of best practices for demonstrating compliance and measuring improvements. In practice, this meant building these practices – things like formal approval processes for all changes and precise documentation needs – into our approach to make sure the client got what they needed.
Keeping the platform live during migration
We knew moving the database and content was going to be challenging. With so many users and sites, it was a moving target because people were adding, moving and deleting things continuously.
First, we reviewed and archived old and inactive blogs to make sure we only transferred what was needed. Then the move to the new infrastructure and S3 buckets had to be done in stages. We ran the process several times: copying the data, then running it again to pick up any changes. The media migration took several days and the database around 24 hours. With this careful planning, we were able to keep downtime to a minimum.
Ongoing support and maintenance
To keep the platform running smoothly and provide clear accountability, we set up detailed SLAs that work within Education Scotland’s ITIL framework. They cover everything from urgent issue resolution to proactive maintenance and regular reporting, including:
- Service desk for quick issue resolution: A Jira Service Desk means that Education Scotland can easily raise and track issues. SLAs are built into Jira, which automatically tracks response and resolution times against agreed service levels. For example, if the Glow team needs an admin user added, Jira makes sure we respond within the agreed timeframe and reports on whether we’re meeting our commitments.
- Regular improvements and fixes: We conduct full builds and deployments to test environments to find and resolve any issues with credentials, configurations or processes. The platform goes through rigorous QA and testing, including load and penetration testing, before Education Scotland runs their own regression testing. We now run automated regression testing for all hotfixes and monthly releases to the live environment.
- Content archiving and deletion: We generate monthly automated reports listing all blogs with stats like last access date and number of users. These help Education Scotland identify candidates for archiving or deletion, and help keep the platform efficient and manageable.
- Monthly reporting: We provide regular monthly reports covering hosting costs, tickets raised and resolved, response times and SLA performance, giving Education Scotland full visibility of platform health and our service delivery.
The impact
The redesigned AWS infrastructure and staged migration delivered major improvements to both costs and security, and teaching and learning continued uninterrupted throughout the move.
Education Scotland now has a secure, cost-efficient platform that serves their 350,000 teachers, lecturers and students across Scotland. The platform runs more efficiently, costs less, and is better protected against security threats, all while staying responsive to what educators need.