The University of Bahrain (UoB), the Kingdom’s largest public university with over 28,000 students, is going all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS), provider of cloud computing services.

The university is in the final phase of migrating its entire IT infrastructure to AWS. Once finalised, UoB becomes the largest university in the Middle East to migrate its core applications which includes the student information system (SIS), correspondence management system (CMS), homepage portal, and subdomain, and all of its backend systems to AWS.

Cloud benefits includes cost savings, security, agility and more

By migrating to AWS, UoB is said to experience benefits including cost savings, increased security, and the agility to launch new projects and bring new ideas to life at speed. On AWS, core applications are optimised, resulting in performance improvement of more than 40 percent. The migration also resulted in over 50 percent performance improvement to the university homepage, which is the landing page that links to all of its subdomains and student services.

Another benefit of migrating to AWS is the ability to accelerate research timelines for the university’s Masters and PhD students by giving them access to advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and high performance computing (HPC) to allow them to quickly analyse massive datasets. With the cloud, the researchers can also easily share their results with collaborators in universities from around the world.

For a seamless migration, UoB invested in workforce development through extensive training for its IT team, who attained AWS certifications that helped give them the necessary skills to deliver the project. The on-demand cloud services enable the university’s IT teams to build secure environments while freeing up their resources to focus on student success.

UoB’s cloud journey

The migration to AWS comes as a continuation to UoB’s cloud computing strategy that has been implemented over the last few years. In 2017, UoB introduced the AWS Academy program, a curriculum that prepares students to pursue careers in the cloud computing space and take globally recognised AWS Certification exams.

In 2019, UoB became the first university in the Middle East to introduce the Cloud Computing Degree Program in collaboration with AWS Educate. And earlier this year in 2020, UoB launched a Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) in collaboration with Tamkeen and AWS that focuses on accelerating the digital transformation of the public sector in Bahrain, and across the region, by working with institutions and the next generation of technologists to use cloud technologies to solve real-life challenges.

Featured image credit: University of Bahrain