AWS Public Sector Blog
Turning urgency into opportunity: NJIT’s 10-week cloud migration
New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) faced a decision when sudden licensing changes meant the university’s operating costs for its private virtual cloud environment would rise significantly. The university operates with a single, centralized IT team managing all technology infrastructure—from core services to discipline-specific academic platforms, high-performance research computing, grant-funded projects, data warehouses, and more—so the potential budget impact called for a fast, coordinated response.
With only 10 weeks before renewal, NJIT worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and TEKsystems Global Services (TGS) to migrate more than 200 essential virtual servers to the AWS Cloud—70% faster than typical timelines. These workloads included enterprise applications, web servers, academic file and database servers, and infrastructure support servers. The swift transition avoided a costly licensing increase and positioned the university to operate more effectively at scale and shift investments from legacy technologies to student-facing services.
Supporting enterprise, academic, and research technology from one IT team
While many higher education institutions operate with decentralized IT departments across the organization, NJIT centralized its technology infrastructure years ago. “We have such a wide catalog of services,” said Matthew Hoskins, director of core systems and cloud services for NJIT. “Every technology is somewhere in the university. If we’re not using it in the enterprise, someone is trying to teach it in a classroom.”
The scope is immense: databases for academics and research, coding environments, web hosting, distributed file systems, storage, high-performance computing, and even infrastructure for the university’s makerspace. The team also manages cybersecurity, digital signage, and support for new buildings, facilitating campus growth.
NJIT’s centralized structure allowed the university to scale efficiently while maintaining consistency across all these environments. When licensing changes put pressure on its entire infrastructure, that same centralization became an advantage—enabling the school to rapidly evaluate all 500+ servers and coordinate decisions on which workloads to migrate first. For institutions with siloed IT departments, that kind of coordinated response would be nearly impossible.
Navigating the complexity of a 10-week deadline
NJIT was gradually moving workloads to the cloud, but the compressed timeline created by sudden licensing changes introduced new challenges. Working across multiple teams, NJIT needed to quickly identify which systems required immediate migration from its 500-plus server environment.
The selection process required coordination between the applications management group, academic research and computing, business and academic stakeholders, and core systems teams to determine what could realistically move to the cloud now and what needed to stay on premises until later phases. NJIT identified 200 servers as ideal candidates for cloud migration.
After this selection, the next challenge lay in migrating systems without complete visibility into application architectures. “We didn’t necessarily have an extensive understanding of all these applications and their dependencies,” said Hoskins. “We didn’t fully understand how they communicate with each other in some cases.” This lack of documentation would become one of the project’s biggest technical challenges, requiring the team to discover dependencies and connections in real time.
While migrations of this scale often take six to 12 months, the right combination of preparation, collaboration, and tools can significantly accelerate that timeline. For NJIT, success meant assembling a team ready to move fast and solve problems collaboratively as they emerged.
Building the team, securing funding, and reskilling for the cloud
With limited documentation, tight deadlines, and 200 servers to migrate, NJIT relied on existing relationships with TGS, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, and AWS. All three organizations established a collaborative approach from the start. “Not every consulting company would want to take on a project like that,” said Hoskins.
Adam Mendlik, principal cloud architect at TGS, described the approach: “We had conversations early on where we aligned on what NJIT wanted to accomplish, and the challenges they faced. Having that shared understanding was key to the collaboration and meeting the deadline together.”
AWS played a critical role in achieving the aggressive timeline. Beyond providing funding through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), AWS solutions architects worked closely with the team on weekly calls, troubleshooting issues, and providing architectural guidance. The engagement included two in-person workshops of intensive hands-on training sessions with labs and exercises that transferred essential cloud expertise to NJIT’s staff, so they could manage and continue modernizing its new environment long after the migration was completed.
Managing technical challenges and modernization
After migration began, the team navigated new technical hurdles. Adjusting processing power and memory for each application was built into the project timeline, allowing the team to refine configurations as real-world performance data replaced initial estimates. The biggest challenge proved to be complex re-IPing requirements that forced the applications team to hunt down hardcoded IP addresses buried in legacy applications. When those addresses were identified and fixed, many connectivity issues that had initially seemed daunting simply disappeared. Resolving this and other technical debt throughout the project has continued to pay dividends, making NJIT’s technology operations more efficient and effective.
The collaborative teamwork enabled NJIT to tackle broader improvements alongside immediate problems. Rather than simply replicating its existing environment, the TGS team implemented a scalable, secure, and governed Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS (LZA) that provides a holistic view of AWS accounts across the enterprise. This modernized account structure introduced role-based access controls, network architecture controls for inbound and outbound traffic, and improved security governance across all environments.
This landing zone environment also introduced account vending capabilities for NJIT’s research division, allowing rapid provisioning for specialized workloads. With department-level billing, resource tagging for cost visibility, and detailed governance controls in place, NJIT can now track spending by team or project and deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) workloads in Quantiphi baioniq with confidence. Additionally, TGS addressed AWS LZA limitations by implementing a custom solution for load balancer deployment, providing flexibility for future application architectures.
Redirecting savings to student-focused programs
“If we can deliver IT services more efficiently, there’s more money for programs that benefit students directly,” said Hoskins. “We don’t want to spend more on IT than we have to.” This philosophy drove the entire project, and the results delivered exactly what NJIT needed.
By migrating to AWS, NJIT achieved more than $100,000 in cost avoidance tied to the impending licensing increase. In addition to that one-time savings, the migration delivered substantial annual operational savings while transforming how the university funds technology infrastructure, shifting from large capital expenses to operational expenses and freeing budget managers from rigid hardware refresh cycles. NJIT also gained infrastructure that automatically scales with campus growth, along with an IT team focused on innovation rather than hardware maintenance.
Within a year of the announced increases in virtual server licensing, NJIT had completed the migration and built significant internal cloud expertise, positioning the university ahead of peer institutions still planning its moves. TGS delivered these outcomes on time and within budget, reinforcing the value of strategic collaboration during high-pressure projects. Most importantly, TGS and AWS helped NJIT move toward its long-term goal of spending less on infrastructure and more on educational programs and ongoing innovation.
Moving toward database modernization and serverless computing
The migration’s success gave NJIT confidence to accelerate its cloud journey. The team is now moving toward database modernization with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and exploring serverless computing and containerization—innovations that would have been much harder to pursue while managing aging on-premises infrastructure.
For universities facing similar pressures, the NJIT experience demonstrates that a crisis can become an opportunity when approached strategically. The key lessons are practical:
- Plan six to 12 months ahead, when possible, but don’t let tight timelines prevent action
- Choose who to work with as carefully as technology—look for teams willing to collaborate and take some risks
- Invest in staff training during compressed projects, as the cloud expertise gained is invaluable
NJIT’s approach shows that with the right team and a willingness to move fast, infrastructure challenges don’t have to become crises. What could have been a major disruption ultimately became a strategic positioning for continued modernization.
Learn how AWS helps institutions build resilient infrastructure that supports educational missions.