Meeting the challenges of South African higher education on AWS

Issues with administrative systems, are one of the foremost challenges facing higher education. Yet, many South African institutions of higher learning are suffering from underfunding, which affects their ability to remediate these issues. Students in South Africa, too, face numerous challenges. Statistics from StatsSA report a 45.5 percent unemployment rate among young individuals (aged 15–34 years). Limited educational opportunities and economic disadvantages are the primary factors driving elevated rates of unemployment. As of 2023, around 18.2 million people in South Africa are living in extreme poverty. About 61 percent of undergraduate students in public universities are funded through government entities.

This post highlights the impact that reliable and efficient education systems can have on reducing the challenges facing higher education in South Africa.

Adapt IT Education and ITS

Adapt IT Education is an education technology (EdTech) partner in South Africa, that provides comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions tailored for public and private higher education, technical vocational education, training (TVET) colleges, and K12 education sectors. Their services span the entire student lifecycle from initial inquiry through registration, supporting students, institutional administrators, lecturers, and management with customized solutions.

The ITS Integrator is Adapt IT Education’s flagship software that seamlessly integrates with third-party applications. It consolidates student management, finance, and human resources (HR) and payroll functions, ensuring compliance with statutory requirements. The Adapt IT ITS Integrator system, a student information system (SIS) that is now at version 4 (v4), has been developing and supporting institutions of higher learning for over 38 years, processing over 4 million student applications annually. For many years, institutions have hosted ITS v4 primarily on-premises or in colocation environments, which poses challenges around infrastructure management. Key institutional processes, like student registration, applications, and selection processes, are resource-intensive but only run at certain times of the year, which means that the infrastructure is potentially under-provisioned when it matters most. On-premises infrastructure requires large capital investments, but because many institutions have limited resources, they sweat the assets over many years, often past the warranty period, leading to them running on older, unreliable infrastructure. Reliability issues often cause delays in the student registration processes, resulting in students not getting placed or classes starting later than scheduled.

UL migrates ITS v4 to AWS

The University of Limpopo (UL), one of South Africa’s largest contact universities, experienced difficulties with its on-premises data center. The infrastructure’s limited performance resulted in operational challenges, including inefficient student application processing and a high administrative load for ICT staff. Backups consumed an entire weekend, negatively impacting staff morale, because these required physical monitoring. Every two days, the disk space had to be manually cleared, often interrupting the user community.

In 2022, UL was the first to migrate its ITS v4 environment to the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. After moving to the cloud, system performance improved dramatically. The system can now handle up to 6,000 late applications, a task previously impossible due to system crashes. The daily student registration capacity has also grown from 1,000 to 4,000 students. This shift resulted in significant operational efficiencies and numerous improvements.

Students and staff can effortlessly access the system, and there have been no security issues. Rethabile Kekana, a senior database administrator at UL, expressed her satisfaction, stating, “I love my job now. AWS has brought significant improvements for me.”

Modernizing ITS on AWS

In 2021, Adapt IT Education started working to reimagine and modernize ITS as a modern SIS for the next generation. ITS Infinity, is an education technology platform designed to enhance the ITS experience, with the latest improvements in business processes and user experience (UX) that improves key performance areas. Working with AWS, ITS Infinity is rewritten to seamlessly scale to support the demands of students wherever they may be. ITS Infinity allows students and staff to complete the applications and selections processes on a mobile-ready interface in a fraction of the time it previously took. ITS Infinity scales seamlessly on AWS, powered by Auto Scaling on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

TUT migrates to AWS to improve system availability

Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), the largest contact university in South Africa with 60,000 students, has been hosting ITS v4 on their on-premises data centers for many years and were facing capacity and availability challenges. The hardware could not handle the increased demand of over 10,000 student registrations, so the IT team had to control the incoming requests to a lower manageable level in order for the hardware to meet demand. TUT didn’t want to purchase additional hardware and licenses just for the student registration period, which resulted in the lack of required elasticity to cope.

The system was also often offline due to power issues, which meant the IT staff spent significant time restarting servers and resyncing the database. This had a significant impact on students, who often traveled far distances from other provinces and could not register due to the system being offline.

To resolve these issues, TUT made a strategic decision to migrate their on-premises ITS v4 to AWS and upgrade to ITS Infinity. However, in late 2023, they suffered a cyber security breach of their on-premises data center, which accelerated the migration to AWS. Working with Adapt IT, they migrated ITS v4 and the majority of TUT’s workloads to AWS by early January 2024. In April 2024, ITS Infinity was live on AWS for TUT and its students.

Mafika Nkambula, director of ICT at TUT, says, “Not only have we improved the performance and reliability of our systems on AWS, we have improved our security posture as well.”

Reducing student challenges—and beyond

In this post, we discussed how migrating education systems to AWS can improve their availability and reliability, allowing institutions to process student registrations faster and with less administrative overhead, improving the student experience.

Read how AWS has worked with other South African institutions, such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria. Learn more about how to evaluate long-term value when migrating SIS applications to AWS and how higher education institutions around the world are using AWS to support research and teaching, connecting the campus community, make data-driven decisions to save money and resources, accelerate research efforts, and more at AWS Cloud for Higher Education.