University of Sheffield Improves Performance 15x by Migrating to AWS with Help from Perform Partners

For many years, the University of Sheffield relied on an on-premises IT system to track and manage the university experience for more than 36,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students. That system covered everything from when prospective students first applied to the university, through their student days, and all the way to their lives as alumni.

But the system was also reaching its limits and needed to change. Rather than update all of its old hardware and software, the University decided to migrate everything to the cloud. “The old system wasn’t really going to take us into any new technology fronts,” says Emma Correia, the university’s head of technology strategy (business systems). “It wasn’t going to help us modernize. It was really only going to keep us where we were. We opted for AWS because of its flexibility and range of services, especially around data management. We’re looking at different ways to gain insights from data and AWS has the services to support those goals moving forward into the future.”

Acting on a recommendation from a trusted longtime IT service provider, the university sought help from AWS Partner Perform Partners. Together, the university and Perform Partners began planning to migrate the legacy system to AWS. “The fact that they had strong cloud skills and were used to doing business transformation was a big part of the reason we chose to work with them,” says Correia, adding that Perform Partners was also experienced in migrating on-premises systems to the cloud. “Their skillset matched perfectly in terms of what they could offer and what we were looking for.”

The university’s immediate priorities were to gain a level of stability and security that the old IT system couldn’t deliver. For instance, it had no fast and easy way to recover in a disaster or quickly move data to another site as a failover measure. The university also wanted to improve its ability to manage data and gain better data insights. And with a more agile and modern cloud infrastructure, it was hoping to make processes faster and more efficient. Using its on-premises system, IT teams had come to expect that actions such as batch processing could sometimes take hours to run—it wasn’t unusual for people to launch a process and then leave their desks to make a cup of tea or handle other responsibilities while the system managed their requests.

As the project got under way, the university prepared for migration by mapping out its existing infrastructure. “A significant part of the project was understanding the intricacies of our existing system because it wasn’t well documented,” says Arthur Clune, chief technology officer (CTO) of the University of Sheffield. “This analysis was needed regardless of whether we opted for a cloud-based solution or maintained our on-premises solution. Our team decided that the additional work to move to the cloud was worth it to gain that transformational step.”

Using that infrastructure map, Perform Partners then developed a plan to build a system on AWS that could deliver those same capabilities—it was designed as a lift-and-shift migration that would leave processes the same as before, but help them to run more quickly and efficiently on AWS. This involved using AWS Control Tower, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Perform Partners also helped the university to adopt a more modern and agile way of working. “Most of their technical capability involved looking after this legacy tech, keeping the lights on, and trying to get more capacity out of the system,” says Shaun Walsh, founding director for Perform Partners. “They needed hands-on help to build the proof of concept, but also to uplift the skills of their in-house teams. I’ve never seen a company as hungry for knowledge transfer.”

After building a proof of concept, Perform Partners worked with the university to develop an implementation plan with critical deadlines. “We had some extremely strict timelines at the beginning,” says Correia. “Perform Partners understood that and worked diligently to meet those. They were really good at that, working long hours, weekends, bank holidays.”

Perform Partners kept the project on schedule, then prepared to make the move to AWS. The migration began on a Thursday, right before a long holiday weekend in May. The process went smoothly, even with the complexity of migrating more than 560 applications and integrations to what was essentially 1,376 interconnected university systems. “We took it all down on a Thursday night, started the testing on Sunday, and then let everybody back in on Monday and it was all just fine,” says Clune.

After the migration, the university saw immediate improvements in areas such as data management, batch processing, and resilience. Data catalogs and records were now automatically updated. And performance in one process improved by a factor of 15, with the time to complete dropping from 90 minutes to just 6 minutes. Development also became faster, thanks to the modern cloud infrastructure and agile methods. The university also gained greater peace of mind about system stability. “From a disaster recovery perspective, the way that we can recover our operations and our data—we could never do that before,” says Correia. “The cloud improves our disaster recovery capability so that we can keep our key systems up and running. That’s been one of the biggest things.”

Because the migration was a straight lift and shift to AWS, the university is now working with AWS and Perform Partners to optimize how it manages its cloud infrastructure and data. It is exploring additional services such as AWS Glue and is looking to make greater use of cloud capabilities such as automation, containerization, and serverless. In addition to those projects, the university is working to retire some of its oldest applications and to refine others for the cloud. Working with AWS, Perform Partners continues to provide support for a variety of projects and is helping the university’s in-house IT team of 310 people to build its cloud management skills. “The university has now got a capable and scalable data repository that can respond quicker, integrate better, and create support for automation,” says Mark Kilner, head of commercial for Perform Partners. “It gives them an edge and allows them to provide better service to their customers—their students.”

“I feel like we are seeing the benefits of AWS available to us faster than I thought we might,” says Correia. “We’ve moved quite a long way ahead quite rapidly. And that really is down to Perform Partners moving us forward.”