Automat-IT Uses AWS to Help the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College Give Students Anytime, Anywhere Access to Video

Since 2012, Automat-IT has been helping enterprises plan and execute DevOps best practices, overcome IT complexity, and move to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. An AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner, the Israel-based company focuses on assisting financial services, public-sector, and technology companies. “We work with clients to manage their DevOps and cloud environments, including design, build, deployment, and management,” says Yoav Zuri, chief technology officer for Automat-IT. “We want to help our customers transform through the cloud.”

Automat-IT works with public-sector customers to accelerate their cloud journeys. One of its newest customers, the Israel-based Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, needed to upgrade its IT environment to support the needs of 5,000 students. As part of the curriculum, students have to access online videos of live and prerecorded lectures. However, the college relied on outdated software for uploading and encoding videos, which caused performance issues. “The school needs high-quality streaming video for students to access on mobile devices and laptops, using all modern browsers,” says Zuri. “Unfortunately, the technology the college used was not supported anymore, and there were always performance issues. The college’s IT team was overloaded, and they were getting support calls every day, which took them away from working on more significant projects.”

Automat-IT worked closely with the college to optimize its IT environment by moving to AWS. Automat-IT implemented a new video-streaming solution based on AWS Elemental, a software solution for video encoding, decoding, and transcoding. The solution uses Amazon CloudFront as its content delivery network (CDN), and it takes advantage of a serverless architecture featuring AWS Lambda to support critical tasks such as user authentication, security, and video format and resolution. Automat-IT uses Amazon Cognito for user sign-in and access control for web and mobile apps and AWS Lambda@Edge to run code closer to application users, improving performance. “Using AWS, we took an aging, struggling video solution and turned it into a modern system that can be used on all operating systems and browsers on any device,” says Zuri.

Automat-IT and AWS Solution Architects spent several weeks configuring and implementing the college’s new video solution. “Automat-IT is very experienced with AWS technologies, as well as configuration and DevOps best practices,” says Adi Rosen, Chief Information Officer of the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College. “We certainly could not have deployed a solution like this depending on only our own IT staff.”

Using its new AWS solution, the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College has greatly improved the video-viewing experience for students. “Using our previous video-streaming technology, we received daily calls from students, lecturers, and library managers complaining about performance and lack of support for certain browsers,” says Rosen. “Because of the AWS solution implemented by Automat-IT, our video-streaming problems have completely gone away. Our students can now reliably access lectures and other important videos any time, from any device.”

Because the new solution is delivered as a service, the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College’s IT team can focus more time on delivering a better experience for their students, faculty, and administrators. “The Max Stern Yezreel Valley College is a pioneer in the Israel academic market, always striving to be innovative,” says Zuri. “Using this solution hosted on AWS, the school can focus more on that innovation because the IT team no longer has to manage physical infrastructure. Now, they can spend their time enhancing the video solution and developing new services and features that support the college’s overall digital transformation.”

The college is currently working to migrate its data backup environment from the data center to AWS. “We have a trusted relationship with both AWS and Automat-IT, which was one of the reasons this project was a success,” says Rosen. “We plan to continue our relationship, starting with the backup solution, and we trust Automat-IT to help us deliver additional solutions in the future.”