CASE STUDY
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 . available solution , ensuring that Wits students and lecturers have uninterrupted access to the Sakai LMS .
Additionally , thanks to the uninterrupted access to the LMS , as well as the zero-rated of the hosted LMS , Wits now offers an unparalleled student experience . According to Wits , there are several cloud service providers in South Africa , but it had to be smart in selecting a provider that suits its needs . For Wits , AWS became the choice because of the company ’ s service offering and ability to configure its catalogue according to the university ’ s needs . By leveraging AWS ’ secure and compliant infrastructure and implementing AWS ’ best-practice guidelines , Wits has been able to safeguard both the students ’ and university ’ s data .
Data protection is something all organisations that handle personal information of users must prioritise as South Africa ’ s data privacy law , the Protection of Personal Information Act , came into play on July 1 2020 , leaving organisations with a one-year grace period to fully comply with the new legislation .
Thanks to the customer-centric model that AWS uses , Wits is able to reach out to AWS for support . The university managed to deploy AWS in a very constrained period to align with the scheduled opening of the semester to be ready for online teaching and learning .
The turnaround time for this project was of paramount importance , as the teams were able to launch the new environment and migrate from the on-premises environment to AWS in just over a month .
By using AWS , Wits can also ensure that its Sakai LMS environment has high availability and fault-tolerant . This means that even at peak demand , students and lecturers can access Sakai , whereas the previous on-premise solution could not handle peak demands . • www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO
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