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Welcome to Silicon Overdrive!

University of Witwatersrand – Sakai

About the Customer

The University of the Witwatersrand is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits.

The Challenge

Wits had an urgent requirement to move their Sakai Learning Management System (LMS) from their on-premise servers to the cloud due to the COVID-19 lockdown and to ensure availability, security and compliance.

After experiencing an outage on their on-premise Sakai environment at peak demand, the University started exploring cloud solutions to ensure the availability of their LMS to their students and faculty.

The Solution

The Silicon Overdrive team worked closely with the Wits and AWS Public Sector teams to architect and implement a secure, fault-tolerant and highly-available solution.

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 achieved a highly available solution, ensuring that Wits students and staff have uninterrupted access to the Sakai LMS

Amazon CloudFront (Content Delivery Network) is used to cache the Sakai application content to South African edge locations for the fast delivery of the content to students.

Furthermore, the University wanted to reduce the data costs for students accessing Sakai from home, so the University approached the local Mobile Operators to zero-rate these data charges.

The Outcome

Turnaround time for this project was of paramount importance. The teams were able to launch the new environment and migrate from the on-prem environment to AWS in just over a month. Since the new environment went live, Wits has had 100% uptime. The students now have an unparalleled user experience due to fast and locally cached content, and zero-rated data charges.
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