CASE STUDY
THERE WAS AN URGENT REQUIREMENT TO MOVE SAKAI LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FROM WITS ON-PREMISE DATA CENTRE TO THE CLOUD TO ENHANCE AND FACILITATE ONLINE TEACHING AND LEARNING .
“ There were frequent outages on the locallyhosted Sakai environment at peak demand , hence the exploration of cloud solutions to ensure the availability of our LMS for our students and lecturers ,” he said .
Part of the Wits University mission is sustaining globally competitive standards of excellence in learning , teaching and research .
To achieve this goal , the university needed to ensure that students and lecturers could access the LMS at any time . By deploying a highly-available and fault-tolerant environment , Wits can ensure it achieves excellence and a world-class user experience .
Mpofu added that : “ Our vision is to build an ICT department that is relevant and agile , deals with issues with urgency with an aim of contributing to a university that is in a ‘ digital state , competing internationally ’. The COVID-19 lockdown forced us to move swiftly in scaling our capacity to provide students with access to the Learning Management System .”
The legacy IT infrastructure challenge led to Wits selecting Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) as its cloud service provider . Coincidentally , the move came just after AWS opened a data centre region in South Africa .
With these local data centres , developers , start-ups and enterprises , as well as government , education and non-profit organisations , can run their applications and serve end-users in Africa with lower latency and leverage advanced AWS technologies to drive innovation .
“ AWS came at the right time for Wits University in that a perennial problem of the Learning Management System going down during critical times became a thing of the past . The professional set up by
AWS of guaranteed availability , security and scaling assured 24 by 7 access from anywhere – giving Wits the Edge . The architecture design was top standard leading to mobile network operators ( MNOs ) agreeing to zero-rate it after conducting extensive tests to ensure that the design mitigated the issues that MNOs had previously had regarding cloud-hosted solutions ,” Mpofu said .
By implementing Sakai LMS using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( EC2 ), Amazon Relational Database Service ( RDS ) and Amazon Elastic File System ( Amazon EFS ) across Multiple Availability Zones ( Multi- AZ ), the university has achieved a highly
52 INTELLIGENTCIO www . intelligentcio . com