A Case for Cloud Hosting: The Tate Museum
When a place with the stature of The Tate Museum announces it is scrapping its entire website to rebuild it as an interactive open source site that is cloud hosted after over ten years of html-centric traditional hosting, it is bound to be news.
Their current site, which used hand-coded HTML files, sees over 18 million visitors a year. It has what is often referred to as a brochure style website, intended to give potential and current Tate Museum visitors vital information, but lacking the ability to deliver interactivity. It is this interactivity, especially with regards to how it would engender debate amongst the users, which brought the museum to the decision to move to Drupal, an open source content management system and to have it hosted in the cloud.
The head of Tate online, John Stack, says that the project is already at the two year mark in its development and that when completed will see every page of the site completely redesigned. After testing the concept of cloud hosting with what Stack refers to as “bits of clouding” the decision was made that the best use of resources would be to move the entire site completely to cloud hosting. This move would save the Tate Museum on ongoing costs as well as make it possible to stay current on software and give them some flexibility with the site.
Discussing the advantages of this move, Stack explained, “Previously, we would want to deploy pre-supplied software, such as e-learning and open source software, only to find that we needed specific versions of PHP or MySQL. As it wasn’t in the package, we faced additional costs and had to go round the houses to find money. We had no time to wait around, working out what to do with hosting.”
With the new cloud hosting, the plan is to encourage visitors to get involved in discussions on art, include mobile accessibility of the site for visitors from their cell phones while at the Tate, and the ability to change content rapidly with each new exhibit became a reality and well within the museum’s recently reduced budget.
With a small IT department, a need to respond to constant challenges as exhibits change and a down-sizing of budgets for all non-profits including museums, this was the perfect time to make the move for the Tate Museum to cloud hosting.
“Engaging with a global online audience, as well as our millions of gallery visitors, is an increasingly important part of what Tate does,” explained Tate Media Director Marc Sands. Looking forward to the developing of apps for weekly art debates and new games based on current exhibits, he said he is looking forward to this new technology giving the Tate an ability to “open up even more exciting and diverse ways to make this possible.”
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