Executive Summary: Global University's on-premise LMS was failing under the load of remote learning. We successfully migrated them to a scalable Azure PaaS solution, ensuring 99.9% uptime during critical exam periods and improving the student experience.
The Challenge
A research university with about 18,000 students and faculty members. However, they faced significant hurdles:
- Crash Prone: System went down during every finals week.
- Security: Student data was vulnerable on unpatched servers.
- UX: Interface was dated and mobile-unfriendly.
Our Solution
We migrated the LMS to Azure:
- Azure App Service: For auto-scaling web tiers.
- Azure SQL Database: Managed database to handle high concurrency during exams.
- CDN Integration: To serve video lectures quickly to students globally.
System Availability During Finals
Uptime %
Implementation Roadmap
1 Month
Planning
Architecture design and capacity planning.
3 Months
Migration
Moving 6TB of course content.
1 Month
Testing
Load testing with simulated 25K users.
1 Weekend
Go Live
Switchover during semester break.
Key Results
The new system supported roughly 18,000 active students during finals week without a major issue. The updated UI/UX also led to higher student engagement scores.
"Finals week used to be a nightmare for IT. This year, it was a non-event. Everything just worked."
CIO, Global University