Cloud Migration Success – Modernizing IT Infrastructure for a Leading University
Client Overview
A mid-sized public university serving over 10,000 students across multiple campuses sought to modernize its aging IT infrastructure. The university relied heavily on legacy, on-premises systems for student information management, learning management, and administrative operations. These systems were increasingly unreliable, costly to maintain, and unable to scale with growing digital demands—especially during peak registration and remote learning periods.
Challenge
The university’s core applications—including its Student Information System (SIS), Learning Management System (LMS), and finance and HR platforms—were hosted on outdated, on-prem servers with limited redundancy, performance bottlenecks, and high operating costs. The IT team faced:
* Downtime during peak enrollment periods
* Complex patching and upgrade cycles
* Limited disaster recovery capabilities
* Inability to scale or support remote access efficiently
The university leadership decided to move to a cloud-first approach to improve agility, cost-efficiency, and student/faculty experience.
Infotix’s Role
Infotix was engaged as a strategic partner to lead the end-to-end migration from on-prem to a secure, scalable cloud environment, with minimal disruption to university operations.
Scope of Work:
* Assessment and planning of existing infrastructure and applications
* Cloud platform selection (AWS for SIS and administrative apps, Microsoft Azure for LMS and collaboration tools)
* Migration roadmap with phased execution
* Data and application migration with integrity and compliance assurance
* Training and enablement for IT staff
Solution Highlights
1. Cloud Readiness Assessment
Infotix conducted a 4-week technical and operational assessment to identify workloads suitable for cloud migration, map dependencies, and evaluate risk.
2. Migration Strategy
A hybrid approach was adopted—mission-critical services like SIS and email were migrated first, followed by finance, HR, and content repositories. A “lift and optimize” model was used, rehosting key apps while refactoring others for better cloud performance.
3. Execution and Deployment
* Migrated over 50 TB of data to AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage
* Deployed cloud-native versions of Moodle LMS and integrated it with Azure AD for SSO
* Implemented robust security protocols including IAM, encryption at rest, and automated backups
* Leveraged auto-scaling and load balancing to ensure high availability during peak traffic
4. Training and Knowledge Transfer
Infotix delivered hands-on workshops and documentation to upskill the internal IT team on cloud management, monitoring, and cost optimization.
Results
* 99.99% system uptime achieved within 30 days of migration
* 30% reduction in IT operational costs within the first year
* 70% improvement in application performance during high-demand periods
* Enabled remote access and disaster recovery, improving resilience
* Reduced manual patching and downtime, freeing IT staff to focus on innovation
Conclusion
This successful on-prem to cloud migration allowed the university to future-proof its IT infrastructure, improve student and faculty experience, and create a scalable foundation for ongoing digital transformation. Infotix’s structured approach, deep cloud expertise, and higher education understanding played a pivotal role in the project’s success.
