Many large research universities now have cloud projects for almost every aspect of their enterprises as they move core student registration, finance, and HR applications to AWS. In this session, university executives report on their efforts and share their approaches to vision, strategy, culture, education, staffing, and technology. You receive practical advice about how to begin the journey to adoption, and learn about frameworks that can help you make decisions in your own educational environment.

1. © 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Sri Elaprolu - Manager, Solutions Architecture, Amazon Web Services
Mandie Chapman - Senior Business Systems Analyst, University of Michigan
Christopher Malek - Manager of Academic Development Services, California Institute of Technology
October 2015
ISM203
Enterprise Cloud Adoption
Strategies in Higher Education

2. What to Expect from the Session
• Why AWS for education
• Practical advice on how to begin the journey
• Adoption strategies and frameworks
• Lessons learned

3. Cloud is becoming the New Normal

4. Time to Results
Access infrastructure
in minutes
Low Cost
Pay-as-you-go pricing
Elastic
Easily add or remove capacity
Globally Accessible
Easily collaborate with
users around the world
Secure
A collection of tools to
protect data and privacy
Scalable
Access to effectively
limitless capacity
Why Do Education Customers Love Using AWS?

5. Business of Education
• Public & departmental websites
• Development & test environments
• ERP systems
• Data analytics
• Student information system software
• Disaster recovery
• Data center migrations
• Storage & backup

6. • UND migrated website and global student and
faculty authentication store to AWS with plans to
move 80% of its workloads in the next three years.
• UND Reports 40% savings on IT operational costs
annually.
We are confident in saying that
the AWS infrastructure has
performed exactly as intended.
Sharif Nijim
Enterprise Application Architect,
University of Notre Dame
”
“
Supporting Business of Education (Examples)
University of Maryland University College (UMUC) needed to replace its
legacy applications and decided to use AWS to run its new analytics
platform as well as several administrative workloads. By using AWS,
UMUC improved the performance of its analytics platform by twentyfold
and enabled its engineers to focus on building new applications instead of
managing IT infrastructure.
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana is the largest community college in
the United States. About 170,000 students register for classes each year;
school maintains a student database with about 1.7 million records. School
needed to scale existing systems, including operational data store (ODS). By
leveraging AWS: Queries complete in as little as three seconds, down
from 40 minutes; Licensing and monthly operational costs are about 60
percent less.

7. Online Teaching / Learning Solutions
• Lecture capture
• Learning / course management systems
• Distance learning
• Massive open online courses (MOOCs)
• Student lab environments
• Virtual desktop / virtual application delivery
• 21st century learning & collaboration

8. • With more than 300 classes on its website,
Coursera needed to track student data, store and
deliver videos, and enable students and teachers
to interact with each other
Teaching/Learning Use Cases on AWS (Examples)
• Using AWS, the company can dynamically handle
workload as two million students across 650 schools in
30 countries access the system
• AWS allows Echo 360 to deliver a reliably solution
globally at 30 percent less than what a customer would
be able to do on its own.
We could not scale our
business as seamlessly without
AWS – and we certainly couldn’t
do it on a global basis.
Tony Abate
COO, Echo360
”
“

9. Research on AWS
• Genomics research
• Statistical analysis
• Mathematical modeling
• Computational fluid dynamics
• Grid/cluster/high performance computing

10. • Carat is an application for mobile
devices that uses big data to
analyze energy productivity and
improve cell phone battery life
• By using AWS, UC Berkeley’s
researchers are able to focus on
research, analysis, and customer
service instead of administering
computing resources
Research Use Cases on AWS (Examples)
• The Biological Engineering Department scaled to meet
the demands of more than 6,000 users, who have
designed more than 50,000 synthetic DNA sequences
We can create an algorithm that
can take 32, 64, 128 different
cores, and make it accessible to
anyone in the world.
Howard Salis
Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Penn State
”
“

11. Global Impact Initiatives for Science
AWS Research Grants AWS Hosted Public Datasets
•Dedicated team focusing on
scientific computing &
research workloads
•Globally focussed and engaged
in big science projects like the
SKA.
•Leveraging AWS resources all
over the world.
•Ensuring the cloud is able to
make a disruptive impact on
science.
AWS SciCo Team
• Grants to initiate & support
development of cloud-enabled
technologies.
• Typically one-off grants of AWS
resources like Amazon EC2 (compute) or
Amazon S3 & Amazon EBS (storage), or
more exotic like Amazon Kinesis &
Twitter feeds.
• Frequently results in reusable resources,
like AMIs or open data, which we
strongly encourage.
• Lowers the risk to try the cloud.
• Large and globally significant datasets hosted
and paid for by AWS for community use.
• Data can be quickly and easily processed
with elastic computing resources in the
surrounding cloud.
• AWS hopes to enable more innovation, more
quickly.
• Provided in partnership with content
owners, who curate the data.

12. Peering with Global Research Networks
Image courtesy John Hover - Brookhaven National Lab

13. Universities All-In on AWS (Examples)

14. Labs and training on
cloud topics and AWS
products
Open course content by
leading professors and
AWS
Grants for free
usage of AWS
services
Communities that
share best practices
virtually and in person
We invite you to join AWS Educate
Accelerate cloud learning with AWS credits, cloud training,
course content, and collaboration tools
Not a student or educator? Help extend AWS grants to more students by inviting your network to participate (#awseducate).
Learn more at: www.awseducate.com

15. © 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Mandie Chapman and Chris Wood
October 2015
University of Michigan
Cloud adoption strategies at a
decentralized university

16. The University of Michigan
Established in 1817, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan
19 schools and colleges
22 non-academic departments
28,395 undergraduate students
15,230 graduate students
7,701 faculty
31,495 staff

17. Information and
Technology Services - Two
Roles
1. Cloud service provider
2. Cloud service adopter
Cloud
Foundational
Strategy
CO
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PHR
LSA
ITS
SP
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A&D DE
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ME
D
SNR
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KIN
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SMT
D
LA
W
SOE
RO
SS
PH AdministerConsult
IntegrateEnable

19. Enable campus to focus on the
mission of their business through
the use of cloud services
Flexible
Easy Cost Effective
Secure
Agility
Innovation

21. Strategy – How Do We Help Adoption?
Enable AdministerConsultIntegrate
Provide contract,
University billing; develop
user groups, communities
of practices, and training
materials
Provide integration from
cloud vendors to local
data via secured networks
Provide in-depth
knowledge on chosen
cloud vendors including
best practices, solution
design, financial impact
assessment, migrations,
and implementation
Configure, operate,
maintain, and monitor
cloud solutions

23. Culture - Who Is Driving Cloud Adoption?
Leadership
Central IT driving leadership
• Articulate value proposition
• Cost/flexibility/scale
• Faster innovation
Leadership driving central IT*
• Understand drivers
• Security/compliance
• Political drivers
• Institutional reputation
*UM – Leadership is driving central IT

24. Campus
Central IT driving campus
• Understand campus constraints
• Budget/funding model
• Staff resources
• Trust/security
Campus driving central IT*
• Understand drivers
• Enable/not obstruct
• Need and speed (bi-modal IT)
*UM – Campus is driving central IT
Culture - Who Is Driving Cloud Adoption?

25. IT Staff
Central IT driving IT staff
• Understand IT staff perspective
• Job security
• Loss of control
• Skill set gaps
IT staff driving central IT
• Understand consequences
• Loss of talent
• Viewed as slow to change
Culture - Who Is Driving Cloud Adoption?

27. Education – How Can We Help?
What does
leadership
need
What does
campus need
What do IT
staff need
Retooling and
training in
cloud services
Develop a
training plan
for campus
Elevator
speech

29. Structure/Staffing – Order Matters
Strategy Structure Staffing
Develop your cloud
adoption strategy
Evaluate organizational
structure
• Siloed
• DevOps
• Shared
Unified team vs
technology domains*
Adjust your staffing
needs
• Architects
• Cloud Consultants
• Cloud Administrators
*UM – Unified team is our direction

31. AWS Microsoft
AT&T
Rackspace
Google
IBM
HP
CiscoVMware
Technology
Leverage industry advisors
CenturyLink
Verizon
Specialize on a few
select cloud
providers with proven
track records

32. Recommendations
1. It’s never too late to set your strategy
2. Consider your culture.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” - Peter Drucker
3. Cost isn’t everything
4. Invest in educating your staff
5. Be deliberate, have dedicated resources
6. Understand your financial model and the impacts of moving to the cloud

33. © 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Christopher Malek, Manager of Academic Development Services, Caltech
October 2015
Caltech in AWS
More with less

34. • California Institute of Technology
• Pasadena, CA
• Top-tier university: #1 in Times
Higher Education world rankings
• Small: 6400 people (1000
undergrads, 1200 grads, 300
faculty, 3900 staff)
• 3:1 undergrad-faculty ratio
• JPL: Founded by Caltech in 30s,
managed for NASA since 1958

35. Academic Development Services
• Part of IMSS, the central IT org
• Lean, 6 people, all developers, even management
• 35 years of collective systems administration experience
• 50 years of collective development experience
• ~130 websites and web applications, including www.caltech.edu and the
campus intranet portal
• Much smaller than counterparts at peer institutions
Our job: Enable research and instruction through software

36. Small School, Big Needs
Top-tier school with small-school resources
• Fewer people and resources than our peers
• Have same needs as those peers, though
• Many vendors historically out of our price range
• Lack of resources caused Caltech to appear behind peers IT-wise

37. Caltech Before the Cloud: DIY
• Engineering in an environment of scarcity
• DIY or not do it
• Much effort on maintaining low level services
• Storage systems, backups, firewall, hardware, file services,
virtualization system, etc.
• Complicated, slow to deploy new services
• Much time spent not actually solving customer problems

38. Cloud Adoption (2010)
Upper management pro-cloud
Operations not pro-cloud
Primary concerns: information security, changing
operational procedures, learning curve, time
Strategy: DevOps, public data, Field of Dreams model

39. Timeline

40. Mar 2011
www.imss.caltech.edu
•Drupal 6, media in
Amazon S3
•Multi-AZ
•Amazon EC2
•ELB
•Amazon RDS
•More tooling

41. Apr 2011
www.caltech.edu
•The “secret” upgrade
•Drupal 6, media in
Amazon S3
•Multi-AZ
•Amazon EC2
•ELB
•Amazon RDS
•First among our peers

42. Oct 2012
www.caltech.edu 2012
•Drupal 7,
Amazon S3-backed
•Auto Scaling groups
•Multi-AZ
•Amazon CloudWatch
•Amazon SNS
•ElastiCache
•Amazon RDS, ELB,
Amazon EC2

43. Oct 2013-2015: Divisions and Admissions
More site rollouts
•Drupal 7,
Amazon S3-backed
•New web services
•Auto Scaling groups
•Multi-AZ
•Amazon CloudWatch
•AWS CloudFormation
•Amazon SNS
•Amazon RDS, ELB,
Amazon EC2

44. Current Projects
Move intranet portal to cloud
• VPC with tunnel to campus
• Leverage Docker and Amazon ECS for deployment and scaling
• Much infrastructure migrating to VPC: LDAP, Shibboleth, Syslog
• Tighter ties to our on-campus infrastructure
Move hosted CMS service to cloud
• About 100 sites
• Amazon ECS, Amazon S3

45. What We Gained

46. Agility
Utility pricing, programmable infrastructure, post-scarcity
• Low cost to try things out
• Adapt quickly
• Evolve processes
• Clone environments
• Enabler for DevOps

47. New Capabilities
Costly or impossible to do ourselves
•Multi-AZ
•Elastic Load Balancing
•Amazon S3
•Amazon ECS
•Auto Scaling
•IAM
•AWS CloudFront
•Amazon EFS
•Etc.

48. Focus on Our Value
Leverage AWS scale and expertise
•AWS better than us at many things
•Don’t have to run low level services
•Allows us to concentrate on how we add value

49. Cloud Adoption (2015)
5 years now in AWS; ~90 instances
Upper management still pro-cloud
Operations very pro-cloud
Field of dreams model worked

50. Lessons
Upper management support was critical
Customer support and trust was also critical
Caltech’s small size helped
Team’s particular expertise helped
Take baby steps and choose low hanging fruit first
Learning curve is long; dedicate people and time to it
Expect to do it wrong and then adapt
Be prepared to rethink the way you do things

51. Remember to complete
your evaluations!

52. Thank you!