The University of Newcastle completed its migration from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud in nine months instead of the 18 months it originally anticipated needing for the project.
The university’s chief information officer, Anthony Molinia, said in a post on LinkedIn that Newcastle has become the first Australian university to move completely to the cloud, a project which included the demolition of its on-premises data centre.
Amazon Web Services was chosen as the replacement for on-premises infrastructure, and has helped create the university’s new cloud operating model and architecture as part of an ongoing relationship.
The university’s move to cloud is also being supported by cloud migration partner Deloitte and cloud operations partner CSA.
Molinia said in a separate statement that one of the driving factors behind the move was the need to respond to changing demands from its community and implement solutions quickly.
“With a cloud platform, infrastructure solutions and tools such as secure data storage - that would normally be procured over several weeks - can be provisioned within minutes.
“This will place the university at an enormous advantage throughout the year.”
The move also supports the university’s environmental strategy by using AWS’ economies of scale and removing the need to maintain and continually upgrade on-premises hardware.
Molinia added that the university’s recent experience with COVID-19 has proven the benefits of being able to rapidly and flexible scale-up different cloud-based solutions as students, staff and academics largely shifted to working from home.
“2020 has become the year of disruption and our early adoption of cloud-based services, communication and collaboration channels was key to the University’s successful pivot to remote learning and working in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Further applications and services will be brought online following this initial migration.
“In particular, our researchers and academics can expect to experience better access to resources across multiple platforms and perform faster testing and analysis of research.”
