For One University, IT Resilience Meant Extending into the Cloud

Last week, we discussed the transition in how organizations are thinking about Disaster Recovery. You can read that blog post here, but the advice was this: causes of downtime are more mundane and frequent than many organizations think, and in order to be prepared, the best strategy is to move away from reactive Disaster Recovery to a more proactive position of IT resilience. For most organizations, this will be both a technological and cultural shift, but it will be a necessary one.

IT resilience is not just about how you failover and failback. It’s about where your data lives, how it is protected, and how, when, and by whom it can be accessed. For many organizations, the answer will be a move to the cloud, as one of our higher education customers learned.

Higher education institutions are often an excellent fit for the OVHcloud™ Hosted Private Cloud solution. They are generally heavily virtualized, with legacy systems running on VMware®. They have been slower to adopt cloud solutions, but the need to transform is building swiftly. More learning is happening online, and more data is being transferred. Colleges and universities are handling sensitive financial and personal data. As more information becomes available to students and prospective students, the competition to bring students to their institution is growing. The industry is ripe for disruption.

One of our customers, a state university with over 14,000 students enrolled, recognized a need to begin to optimize and modernize its infrastructure. Protection of student data and high availability were paramount to their success and moving their critical applications to the cloud was a logical first step in their journey. 

Using VMware’s Hybrid Cloud Extension, the university was able to migrate 22 virtual machines that they used to host many mission-critical online services for their students to OVHcloud data centers. The process took only four days to complete; the cloud environment mirrored their on-premises VMware stack, and our cloud architects spoke the same VMware language, so there was very little need for discovery or testing. Everything was easy and intuitive.

After a successful transition, the administration is becoming more open to growing its cloud footprint and moving beyond on-premises data centers. 

If your organization is virtualized on VMware, Hosted Private Cloud is an excellent starting point on your cloud journey. Learn more here. We can also help you with your specific Disaster Recovery needs.