ASU Solves Performance and Security Challenges by Modernizing on AWS with ERPA

Alabama State University (ASU) partnered with ERPA to modernize its technology infrastructure on AWS and update its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, PeopleSoft, to transform the digital experience for ASU’s students and staff. One of the top five historically black colleges or universities (HBCUs) in Alabama, ASU had been struggling with the performance and limitations of its legacy technology. ERPA overcame these challenges with a well-architected and high-availability infrastructure on AWS, leveraging Amazon EC2 for secure and resizable compute capacity, Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS for scalable storage, and Amazon RDS for secure and fully managed database services.

Alabama State University (ASU) was running outdated, unsupported PeopleSoft applications on an aging, on-premises infrastructure that frequently experienced outages and other significant performance issues. These applications are essential to the university’s operations, including student recruitment, class registration, advisement, financial recordkeeping, employee onboarding, benefits enrollment, and system access. According to Dr. Damian Clarke, who joined as ASU vice president of technology in November 2022, “PeopleSoft is our main application that runs the institution and is one of our largest IT investments. When systems run on poor technology, it leads to a lot of waste and makes things more difficult than they should be.” Dr. Clarke brought a sense of urgency to the university’s digital transformation.

This challenging environment limited the university’s ability to recruit and enroll students, process financial aid requests, retain employees, and maintain solid security in its digital systems. Many processes were being handled manually and required time-consuming data entry by staff members. The aging infrastructure also prevented ASU from accessing many PeopleSoft features, limiting its return on investment.

With a small IT staff and constrained budget, ASU enlisted the help of ERPA—a leader in enterprise application management, cloud modernization, and consulting services and an AWS Partner—to stabilize technology systems and solve the ERP challenges. ERPA migrated ASU’s infrastructure and applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using ActiveGenie, the firm’s proprietary AWS cloud orchestration service that features extensive automation and DevOps methodologies for efficient cloud migration, infrastructure management, and application management. ERPA also updated the university’s PeopleSoft applications with the latest features and software patches.

ERPA’s solution included a well-architected, high-availability AWS infrastructure tailored to stabilize the PeopleSoft applications, delivering immediate improvements in performance and application reliability.

“By re-architecting the way ASU’s PeopleSoft applications were hosted and migrating to AWS, we achieved high availability, reliability, uptime, performance, disaster recovery, software patching, compliance, security hardening, and load testing—all the things you need in a core business system,” says Vishal Kothari, executive vice president of cloud practice at ERPA. “With AWS, we were able to avoid significant capital expenditures for the university and migrate systems to the leading cloud environment with a much more robust set of services.”

The solution uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for highly secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud to cost effectively meet demand, even during peak periods such as student registration. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) enable object and block storage with the scalability, availability, security, and performance needed for mission-critical functions.

ASU’s system leverages Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle to achieve high availability with multiple zones for failover support. “Amazon RDS is a game changer. It lowers our administrative burden and brings more reliability to the table,” says Kothari.

ASU also engaged ERPA for hosted managed services, offloading infrastructure, application, and database management to enable the university’s IT staff to focus on more strategic priorities.

With the newfound headspace, Dr. Clarke and his team have been able to meet with ERPA and ASU’s functional departments to better understand business needs and identify ways technology can drive efficiencies. “As we’ve shown departments how PeopleSoft can make tasks easier and quicker, we’ve increased the excitement and motivation for what could be,” says Dr. Clarke. “We’re developing what we call the ‘Art of the Possible Plan’ and setting a roadmap for each department with technology and best practices.”

ASU is quickly seeing an increased return on investment for technology with improvements across the university. Automated systems now ensure that potential new students receive information in a timely manner, and communications are streamlined between applicants, admissions officers, and financial aid administrators. “For the first time in five years, student enrollment has increased as we can more easily attract and onboard students who are interested in ASU,” says Dr. Clarke.

As staff members and students join or leave the university, system access is now automated for efficient connection and more stringent security. Automated data entry and data workflows save time and boost employee satisfaction. The digital transformation also enables the IT staff to meet compliance and audit requirements more quickly and efficiently.

Dr. Clarke says, “My vision is to leapfrog ASU into a technological state that would allow us to be more operationally efficient, provide hyper-personalized learning opportunities, and provide opportunities at the administrative level to make more informed and quicker decisions that could be easier to implement. This modernization with ERPA and AWS has helped us take a huge first step in that direction.”