ITExperts Helps Faculdade Teológica Sul Americana Centralizes its IT Infrastructure on AWS

As an institution accredited by the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC), Faculdade Teológica Sul Americana (FTSA) has over 4,000 students in its undergraduate, graduate and extension programs. With the growth of online courses, the institution decided to consolidate its IT infrastructure on the AWS that resulted in 40 percent cost savings. ITExperts, an AWS Partner, assisted the educational institution in designing a new architecture based on Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS and Amazon Route 53, among other AWS services.

Faculdade Teológica Sul Americana’s (FTSA) Distance Theology online course has approximately 1,800 students enrolled. With the growth of online classes, there was a need to ensure the stability of online access. “We suffered with constant data loss, which generated rework, and needed a structure that could allow us to think about the use of new technologies, such as business intelligence and data analytic” said Rafael Sposito, head of business development at FTSA. The institution wanted to develop an Information Technology structure that would meet virtual class demands.

The institution decided that its new structure would be hosted in the cloud, and elected Amazon Web Services (AWS) to do so. “We studied other providers, but found the interaction with them to be very complex and not accessible for an institution like ours. AWS offered us the support we needed and a full range of services at an affordable rate that was easy to access”, says Sposito.

FTSA relied on the services of ITExperts, an AWS Partner, to scale and design the architecture. “We designed a migration and consolidation strategy for FTSA’s IT processes and helped them map it out, set migration priorities, and finally started the migration process to AWS. We also helped them find other Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) partners,” recalled Diego Henrique da Silva, founder of ITExperts.

Once the migration was complete, ITExperts has been working on optimizing the infrastructure. “We are tidying up our technology structure, not only to meet the demands of reliability and stability, but also thinking about the use of BI and data analytics in the future,” said Sposito, not only to meet the demands of reliability and stability, but also thinking about the use of BI and data analytics in the future,” said Sposito.

With the new cloud structure and the support of ITExperts, Sposito highlights a series of benefits, including 40 percent cost savings from reduction of data loss and reinstallation of environments, as well as increased satisfaction from users. “The results of the migration are quite positive. User satisfaction has increased due to the reduced need to rework data and improved confidence in the data,” Sposito said.

According to Sposito, the ITExperts team was crucial in the process of surveying the applications and locating where they were hosted. This process took approximately 80 days. “The transition was smooth, thanks to the support from ITExperts. We were able to increase efficiency by migrating to AWS and it gave us the flexibility to adjust the components to meet our needs while organizing our system”, explained Sposito.

The FTSA systems now use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) file repositories with Content Delivery Network (CDN), monitoring reports produced by Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with PostgreSQL. The architecture also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, that support the main FTSA applications and the containers used by the environment; Amazon Route 53, which is the Domain Name System (DNS) service; and Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) for the sending of bulk emails.

ITExperts received support from AWS throughout the entire project from carrying out the proofs of concept (POCs) to testing pilots. “AWS provided us with the technical knowledge and guidance, which helped FTSA in their decision to migrate to the cloud,” Silva said. The entire infrastructure of the educational institution is hosted on AWS and is under the responsibility of ITExperts to manage the entire life cycle of all applications.

According to Sposito, migrating to cloud brought stability for the teaching institution to continue growing. “Today, FTSA is fully aware of all the components of its environment”, says Silva.

Sposito points out that this stability is fundamental to FTSA's plans. “Before migrating to the cloud, we used to register an average of two to three problems every month, and now that no longer exists”, he says, highlighting the reduction of costs generated by data loss and reinstallation of environments as another achievement. “With the stable environment, we can focus on analyzing data and bringing continuous improvement projects to our services”.

The executive explains that the IT team at FTSA is now dedicating itself to adapting the environment's parameters and establishing security processes. Sposito explains that these are issues that must be addressed so the institution can plan on leveraging other AWS services.

During the project, ITExperts established itself as the FTSA's trusted advisor. “In any new project, they call us to help them design and define which solutions will be used and how to work them in the AWS. We are present today in all their technology demands, from the purchase of hardware to ERP maintenance”, celebrates ITExperts’ founder Silva.