FedRAMP® Authorized Website Archiving for Large U.S. Federal Agency

Challenge: Resource-Draining, Severe Website Archiving Delays

The agency faced significant challenges with its previous archiving solution, which caused severe delays and major operational frustrations. Their legacy system could take up to six months to complete a full-site archive during an administration transition, creating bottlenecks that drained resources and required dedicated staff to manage full-time.

This inefficient workflow hindered the department’s ability to meet critical government recordkeeping compliance requirements and respond promptly to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

An internal IT specialist was tasked with finding a new solution to their web archiving challenges, evaluating and reviewing solutions with a focus on security, performance, and regulatory compliance.

Solution: Pagefreezer Automated, FedRAMP® Authorized Website Archiving

After a thorough evaluation, the agency selected Pagefreezer as the ideal solution, striking the perfect balance of cost, performance, and compliance.

Additionally, Pagefreezer offers a public-facing portal that empowers users to self-serve, reducing staff workload while improving transparency. Implementation was completed in just six weeks and required minimal effort from the agency team.

Benefits and Process Improvements:

With the implementation of Pagefreezer, the federal agency saw several significant improvements to their workflows and data preservation:

1

Saving over 800 Hours Per Year on Website Archiving

With daily automated crawls and being able to verify records in under 10 minutes, Pagefreezer truly modernized the agencies website archiving process. Now, only 1–2 hours per month are needed to review archives for accuracy, resulting in an annual savings of over 800 staff hours. This efficiency allows teams to focus on higher-priority initiatives while ensuring correct and reliable records, eliminating the need for a dedicated full-time archiving role.

2

Decreased Open Records Requests with Public Portal by 30%

Making archived content easily accessible to the public with Pagefreezer’s public-facing portal decreased open records requests for website content by 30%. Instead of filing formal FOIA requests, users can now search for and retrieve the information they need directly from the portal. Not only has the self-serve capability reduced FOIA requests and eased the workload on the team, but it has also created greater transparency and helped build public trust.

3

Increased Scope & Scaling Across Agencies

Initially, the project’s scope was limited to archiving critical sections of the website like news, blogs, and speeches. However, once news of Pagefreezer’s ease-of-use and robust archiving capabilities started to spread, the project expanded to include full-site crawling, and was soon adopted across associated agencies.

Conclusion

The website archiving modernization project shows the value of having a reliable, scalable solution like Pagefreezer. By shifting from outdated workflows to a streamlined process, the agency improved operational efficiency, reduced FOIA response times, and laid the foundation for more efficient, reliable archiving workflows across multiple agencies.