Category: Higher education

Since universities typically face reliable bursts of traffic, such as on admissions day, they are not often concerned with the ability to scale infinitely—a key reason for going serverless. By doing so with AWS, the University of York now has the ability to scale down to zero, which helps the university better manage applications, reduce costs, and increase agility.

Modern data engineering covers several key components of building a modern data lake. Most databases and data warehouses, to an extent, do not lend themselves well to a DevOps model. DataOps grew out of frustrations trying to build a scalable, reusable data pipeline in an automated fashion. DataOps was founded on applying DevOps principles on top of data lakes to help build automated solutions in a more agile manner. With DataOps, users apply principles of data processing on the data lake to curate and collect the transformed data for downstream processing. One reason that DevOps was hard on databases was because testing was hard to automate on such systems. At California State University Chancellors Office (CSUCO), we took a different approach by residing most of our logic with a programming framework that allows us to build a testable platform. Learn how to apply DataOps in ten steps.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe in the initial months of 2020, colleges and universities saw their regular learning plans upended. In many instances, in only a week, higher education institutions reconfigured their pedagogical infrastructure for hundreds or thousands of students with widely varying requirements and learning environments. Given the circumstances and the tight timeframe, it was natural for many schools to rely on their existing learning management systems (LMS) in order to transition to fully online learning. Learn how Simpson College went several steps further, leveraging its Moodle LMS not only to provide its courses but also to fuel success for students and the institution, and set up a new way of operating beyond the pandemic.      

Western Governors University (WGU) announced the launch of critical updates to its Bachelor of Science Cloud Computing (BSCC) degree program, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The degree program is designed to prepare students with the skills they need to succeed in today’s economy and meet the demands of employers seeking cloud professionals. 

This week, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and the Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) announced a statewide plan to train and certify at least 5,000 Arizona students in cloud computing by June 2022. The state’s Career and Technical Education Districts (CTED), community colleges, and universities will train students using the AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs. Arizona is the most recent state to collaborate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform their future workforce with cloud readiness and technical education programs.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems handle everything from accounting to marketing, finances to inventory, human resources to customer relations, and more. Colleges and universities commit significant infrastructure and personnel resources to run and manage these vital applications. But shifts in technology adoption, reduced availability of skilled labor, and increased economic pressures push colleges and universities to assess the return on their material ERP system investments. One way higher education institutions realize additional return on their scarce resources is by using cloud technologies. After Arizona State University (ASU) moved to AWS, the university was able to effectively allocate resources to benefit its students and solve operational problems that would otherwise require additional investment. Check out three benefits higher education institutions can recognize by moving ERP systems to the cloud.

In October 2018, the Florida panhandle was hit by Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm that set a new record for the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in the area. Florida State University (FSU) already understood the need for a long-term continuity of operations plan, and the devastation Michael wrought on the surrounding areas solidified how critical a disaster recovery (DR) service is to their overall operations. Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is the business world’s advanced solution to unexpected disruption. Whether the threat comes from natural disaster, technical failure, human error, or malicious action, the result is still unplanned downtime and the need for recovery. Learn how FSU designed and launched their DRaaS solution on an accelerated timeline while optimizing costs.

Swinburne University, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced the creation of Australia’s first cloud degree program. The associate degree of applied technologies – cloud technologies will help undergraduates prepare for in-demand careers in cloud computing. Swinburne created the degree through a collaboration with AWS Educate, Amazon’s global initiative to provide students and educators with resources for building skills in cloud technology.

The University of Bahrain (UoB), the Kingdom’s largest university with over 28,000 students, is going all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The university is in the final phase of migrating its entire IT infrastructure to AWS. Once finalized, UoB becomes the largest university in the Middle East to migrate its core applications—student information system (SIS), correspondence management system (CMS), homepage portal, and subdomain, and all backend systems—to AWS.

Monitoring and tracking student and staff exposure to COVID-19 and reports of those experiencing known symptoms continues to be a critical part of school plans for remaining open this fall. Colleges and universities are creating and using mobile applications that can track users’ symptoms, record COVID-19 test results, get connected to medical resources, and help with contact tracing. Some of these mobile apps built by the university or an AWS Partner use the cloud to securely handle this vital information.