Western Sydney University taps into elasticity, efficiency in a few clicks with Azure

A university that’s not like the others

Welcome to Western Sydney University, a higher education institution that is actively reimagining learning and helping its community tap into their unlimited potential. Emerging as one of the youngest and fastest-growing universities in Australia, it’s eager to use technology to help its 47,000 students, including many first-in-family university enrollees, succeed and its 6,000 staff make a positive impact on campus and beyond. Close to a decade ago, Western was one of the first universities in the continent to embrace flipped and hybrid learning through its vertical campuses, reaching and supporting current and prospective students in more nontraditional ways than previously possible. It also has campuses spread throughout Sydney’s suburbs, allowing it to provide equitable access to education to more curious minds every day.

Off campus, the university is deeply embedded in each of its local communities through impactful research projects and business partnerships. Sustainability is also woven throughout every facet of Western life, with the university recently beating out more than 1,900 higher education institutions globally to maintain its position as number one in the world for social, economic, and environmental impact in the Times Higher Education University Impact Rankings.

This all-around leadership is a rather unique situation in the education sector. Especially on the innovation front, “universities can be glacially slow when it comes to organizational change,” explains Karina Foley, Services Portfolio Manager – Academic and Business at Western. This can be caused by a number of factors: outdated internal policies, a lack of technology maturity, procurement challenges, or embedded fear around changing the status quo. But Western saw great potential in paving a new path forward and, in 2016, decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure and move off its on-premises architecture to a managed environment.

The university migrated half its technology environment to a private cloud environment, but that approach didn’t provide all the anticipated benefits, including the opportunity to modernize the environment, reduce its footprint, get rid of technical debt, and accelerate toward sustainability goals. “It didn’t provide cloud-native tools or anything more than a virtual machine farm, which wasn’t exciting in relation to future-proofing our services,” says Karina. When the existing private cloud infrastructure approached its end of life, that gave Western the push it needed to move to public cloud infrastructure to better meet business demands, leading to a detailed assessment period between the top providers.

Making moves and taking control

Just as Western shifted its strategy, the entire industry was forced to adapt to a global pandemic. Western took the opportunity to retool as it started training staff on the cloud. “This time around, a lot of use cases converged and made it opportune for us to make the move,” explains Huzefa Sabir, Senior Technical Program Manager at Western. The university wanted a modernized platform that it could grow and scale with while taking advantage of the return on investment of its chosen cloud. “We didn’t want just a supplier or a vendor,” adds Karina. “We wanted a true technology partner who would actually come to us with solutions, not just sales pitches.”

Weighing several major cloud platforms against the core Western values of boldness, integrity, fairness, and excellence, the university selected Microsoft Azure and quickly formed a strong relationship with the Customer Success Unit(CSU) Migration Factory team within Microsoft to build a future-fit platform that offered more control and cloud benefits across more than a dozen campuses. “At the end of the day, we were left with less than three months to migrate all our workloads, which was not the original plan, but we did it very successfully—even before our deadline,” says Karina.

Mapping the migration, adding services, and enjoying new capabilities

Western’s on-premises network couldn’t be extended directly to the cloud, but that wasn’t a roadblock—the university specifically wanted to start fresh with a clean estate. To ensure Azure was the best choice, Western did a thorough proof of concept. “We’d spin up a landing zone in Azure, grab a heap of applications, throw them into the cloud, make sure they were running properly, and then bring them back to show migrating wouldn’t be a technical challenge,” says Karina. The university hosted many bespoke applications on Linux, and Md Khan, Senior Technology Specialist at Western, adds, “When we did the assessment, there was no concern that any of our Linux workloads might not work properly or not be compatible.”

The university’s Information Technology and Digital Services (ITDS) team laid the groundwork to help streamline the migration and address previous obstacles, including service agility challenges, minor reliability issues, and limited deployment portal capability. “We went to different users to get details about how every application was built and what impact migrating might have,” says Kiran Paramashivaiah, Cloud Solutions Architect at Western. Gathering three months of application data, the university used Azure Migrate to map those details back and assess which workloads were suitable to move to the cloud. “Compared to other third-party tools, Azure Migrate is one tool that you can deploy and configure in an hour and then you’re ready to go,” says Kiran. This also played a key role in what the full team describes as a unified end-to-end process for the migration. Western ITDS staff also used Azure Migrate to validate their cost comparisons after projecting what would happen if workloads were run 24/7 or only during the workday and what the respective costs would be. They then saved approximately 30% in costs with Azure by scheduling uptime and runtime and shutting down non-production workloads every night.

As Western introduces additional features and capabilities, the university IT environment consists of a mix of Linux virtual machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu and Windows virtual machines, with the former hosting custom applications built in-house and the latter dedicated to off-the-shelf software. “While our initial migration was a lift and shift and we carried some technical debt into Azure, it’s a much more agile environment and platform to now be able to move, improve, and modernize, which was always in the back of our mind,” says Karina. The university also now saves additional costs on Windows and Red Hat licenses using Azure Hybrid Benefit.

Western is now scaling out to add a data lake, automated continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline, and new approach to DevOps as part of its two-year plan post-migration. It’s also running its first Azure AI pilot, which it says wouldn’t have been possible if it hadn’t migrated to Azure. These examples point to how Western has unlocked its own unlimited potential just as it strives to do for its students and staff. “The great thing is that there was a cost saving to migrating our environment as it stood to Azure, and when you consider the modernization and optimization in flight, it was a no-brainer to move off our managed service provider,” says Karina. Adds Kiran, “We’re even starting to migrate our existing data warehouse into Azure, which is going to help us do analytics much faster than we’re used to.”

Navigating change management and staff upskilling

Throughout the migration, Western ITDS staff learned that it was the engagement from and communication between teams that had the biggest impact on how fast they could move. They worked with Microsoft Global Partner Logicalis to build an initial landing zone and migrate production workloads. Then they sought to educate more staff and maintain open lines of communication to influence cultural changes. “Uplifting our colleagues’ capabilities so that they’re in the here and now of this technology is of benefit to them, not just the university,” notes Karina.

Also key was the prework done by Western’s operations team to update knowledge base articles that help with maintaining the new environment and its services. “We had four different run sheets for the migrations, which listed hundreds of individual steps across seven different teams to migrate each server,” says Karina. “Having such a transparent process really elevated trust in the project across ITDS. We didn’t get a lot of pushback about what we were doing, but rather a lot more support than I’ve seen in any other project.”

Scaling up to support more teams and become a global university

Western staff now have access to elasticity, efficiency, and a vast number of resources that they can tap into in a couple of clicks. “We can respond much quicker to business demands as opposed to going in and purchasing hardware because now we can just spin up servers of any magnitude in Azure,” says Amit Prakash, IT Services Portfolio Manager at Western. Md adds, “It also changed the way we think and have visibility on a broad scale.” The added visibility also means Western can now run workloads more securely in Azure, unlocking yet another range of new capabilities. “At this stage where we are really trying to increase our server security maturity, having Azure and all of its security and firewall capabilities, along with the availability of resources, comes at really good timing,” notes Amit.

As the benefits of this new environment extend outside ITDS to individual departments, Western is getting inquiries from more resource-intensive areas of the university about consolidating and creating a holistic landing ground for their workloads. “They see that what we have put together is a go-to platform providing uniform security practices, server operations, and system management, and that is a really good add-on from an operational overhead point of view,” says Huzefa.

Now, when Western starts a project or has a new business requirement, it doesn’t have to have an open market technology discussion. Continues Huzefa, “We just have a platform that we can deploy on and not have to think twice about it.” Adds Md, “From an Azure perspective, a lot of new potential has come along that we haven’t even touched yet, all at a really good time for us.”

And what does that potential translate to in the near future? “There may be an opportunity for us to use the cloud to help Western become a global university,” shares Huzefa. “Our technology platform is now flexible and scalable enough both in terms of capacity and geographical limits that we can utilize it better and reap the benefits.”

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