University of St.Gallen and 4Science modernize research systems on AWS
University of St.Gallen & 4Science — AWS Case Study Summary The University of St.Gallen, a leading Swiss business university, modernized its institutional repository ""Alexandria"" by migrating from aging on-premises EPrints software to DSpace-CRIS on AWS, with AWS Partner 4Science managing the project. Challenge: The 20-year-old EPrints platform had become difficult to maintain (managed by a one-person team), lacked a rich data model to connect researchers/projects/publications, and was overwhelmed by AI bot traffic. The university needed to preserve its strong search engine rankings while modernizing. Solution: 4Science migrated ~54,000 records to DSpace-CRIS on AWS using: Amazon EBS — scalable block storage Amazon CloudFront — content delivery with edge functions to preserve legacy URLs and search rankings Amazon Route 53 — DNS routing AWS WAF — bot traffic management (blocking malicious bots while allowing academic crawlers) Results: 54,000 records migrated successfully 1–2 hours saved per week on infrastructure management Search rankings preserved through careful URL redirection Richer data model connecting publications, projects, and researcher profiles Ongoing managed service relationship with 4Science for updates and support ""4Science is not a faceless support ticket jungle if you are in trouble."" — Ruedi Lindegger, Repository Manager, University of St.Gallen
