Melbourne Business School Experiences 99.89% Uptime with Amazon WorkSpaces

Melbourne Business School (MBS) is the graduate business school of the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. The Master of Business Analytics course is ranked #5 in the world, and provides students with skills and knowledge to become data scientists who can transform the way decisions are made in business. MBS is leveraging Amazon WorkSpaces to deliver consistent performance of course content.

In 2014, MBS was looking for a solution to resolve on-premises performance issues around their teaching environment containing SAS, a critical part of the Master of Business Analytics course work for students. User experience was poor, and feedback from both educators and students reported the solution was both slow and unsustainable for efficient learning.

Selerity, an AWS Registered Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), was brought in by the SAS Institute to architect a robust course delivery solution for MBS. The solution, currently in its third iteration, leverages Amazon WorkSpaces to deliver a customised student desktop image alongside a provisioned Read-Only Domain Controller to manage student authentication in the AWS environment.

 “Delivering our Masters of Business Analytics content using Amazon WorkSpaces for our students dramatically improved performance. Before, the environment was slow due to an aging infrastructure and incompatible software on devices. Over three years, we’ve had consistent uptime of 99.89%. Now, delivery of SAS within the course is as smooth as smooth can be,” said Professor Ujwal Kayande, Director, Centre for Business Analytics and Associate Dean (Academic) at Melbourne Business School.

Today, each student enjoys improved delivery of the course content.

Bring Amazon WorkSpaces to your school to increase access for classroom and distance learners. To make it more affordable, we recently announced that educational institutions can save up to 14% per month on Amazon WorkSpaces by leveraging license discounts from Microsoft for Qualified Education Users. This equates to a $3.52 per user/month savings, and $0.03 per user/hour for WorkSpaces. You can take advantage of this discount if you qualify, based on Microsoft Licensing Terms and Documentation. If you think you may qualify, please contact us so that we can enable the discount for you. There is no upfront investment or financial commitment.