MaGE was convinced by the agility and elasticity that cloud computing provides and decided to build a robust and “future-ready” technology platform to support business growth. Leadership evaluated multiple cloud service providers before choosing Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We looked at agility, elasticity, performance, and cost effectiveness while evaluating cloud providers and finally chose AWS as our trusted partner. Its pace of innovation, years of experience, track record, and the customer-first approach are unmatched,” says Balakrishna Rao, chief information officer at MaGE.

Based on the success of the initial deployments, MaGE decided that the time was right to move to a “cloud-first” strategy and began a massive shift to the cloud. Manipal has moved nine applications and systems—including campaign management and digital marketing, student management, learning management, assessment, and websites—into AWS. By early 2015, Manipal was running 70 percent of its workloads in AWS and had adopted a policy that any new applications have to be delivered as a service from the cloud. The business is also running a disaster recovery environment for its SAP student management system within AWS. During seasonal peaks, these systems handle 100,000 internal assessment uploads per day on EduNxt, 450,000 result hits per day on the student portal for distance learning programs, and three million hits on their website with around 10TB of data transfered each month.

MaGE uses more than a dozen AWS services, including

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and AWS Trusted Advisor.

“We have various technology platforms, OS, and development environments currently running as our own virtual private cloud environment using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. We did not want to compromise on the performance or security of our applications, and the breadth and depth of the AWS platform was crucial to give us the confidence in making the shift to the cloud,” says Rao.

The figure below illustrates MaGE’s environment in AWS: