Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne has more than 30,000 students enrolled and a total of 9,000 faculty and staff. In February 2022, the university found itself at a critical crossroads. Its on-premise IT infrastructure relied on multiple pieces of hardware that were nearing the end of their useful life, posing operational risk but also a great opportunity.
“Migrating to the cloud became a top priority to achieve the cybersecurity maturity we wanted,” says Phil Law, Swinburne's chief information officer. “There were other key drivers, including quality of service, reliability and the ability to optimize costs and resources.”
As a result, the university embarked on a cloud transformation journey to modernize its IT environment in a way that would enable it to establish a benchmark for global digital best practices. The move to Azure combines Swinburne's pursuit of scalability and reliability with its vision for a leading, digitally connected, technology-enabled university.
Setting the course for your cloud migration
Swinburne's vast app portfolio included 3,000 workloads critical to its day-to-day operations, and the IT team faced a critical deadline to migrate by October 2023 to extend the life of the system.
As a first step, the team rigorously evaluated available cloud platforms and concluded that Azure was the best fit for the university's architectural standards and goals. The team also reviewed their app portfolio.
“We didn't know which apps in our portfolio were working and which we wanted to keep and move to the cloud,” says Damith Ratnayake, director of enterprise infrastructure at Swinburne University.
So the team's first task was to catalog and assess Swinburne's app portfolio to determine how business-critical and data-sensitive each app was. This groundwork was invaluable: it gave the IT team greater visibility into its data centers and enabled them to streamline the app portfolio from 3,000 workloads to an estimated 1,600 workloads, of which an estimated 500 were candidates for migration to Azure.
This consolidation was a strategic win, allowing the university to retire many old applications and numerous servers, which not only empowered the IT team to make a smooth transition to the cloud, but also led to significant cost savings and operational efficiencies.
Microsoft Unified Support played a key role in this preparation effort by providing a cost-optimized strategy that delivered predictability and reliability, which was essential in helping the IT team create the business case for the migration and secure support from Swinburne's senior management.
Strategic partnership and support with Microsoft
Swinburne University also enlisted Microsoft's help in using Azure Migration Factory to help speed up the migration process, enabling the university to demonstrate to stakeholders that the migration would be quick, cost-effective, and with minimal disruption to operations.
Microsoft supported Swinburne through the Azure FastTrack program, providing guidance on architecture and cloud adoption best practices. Microsoft's support gave the university's IT team confidence and guidance, accelerating the migration timeline.
During a typically sluggish interim period, the Microsoft Integration Support team assessed the university's landing zone to ensure it was ready for the transition.
“The landing zone repair work was done during what would normally be dead time while Swinburne was in the market to select a partner,” says Praveen Senadheera, senior Azure specialist at Microsoft. “By the time we onboarded our partners, the landing zone was ready and we were able to start migrating test loads right away.”
The migration process was coordinated by two dedicated teams: one focused on running the migration factory, and the other oversaw the RFP process and partner integration. Swinburne's partner, Logicalis, handled the more complex workloads, and the university was able to migrate many of the workloads with support from Microsoft.
To ensure data security during the migration process, the university's IT team also created redundant, high-speed routes between the on-premises environment and Azure, with private links to Microsoft data centers.
Pave the digital future with the cloud
The collaboration between Swinburne, Microsoft and Logicalis is a testament to teamwork and technical expertise. “The success for us was that we were able to manage the migration safely and within the ambitious timeline. We were able to lift and shift 60 apps with minimal disruption to business operations,” says Roe. The university experienced no downtime while critical business workloads were migrated.
Swinburne is now seeing tangible benefits from Azure, such as more reliable services and enhanced network stability. With their engineering teams no longer needing to maintain legacy systems, they can refocus resources to work on higher value projects and innovate in more areas.
The university received support from Microsoft’s Enterprise Skills Initiative to ensure staff were trained and prepared for the new cloud environment, and to invest in skills development to increase employee engagement and retention.
The next phase of Swinburne's cloud journey is focused on optimizing the migrated workloads and leveraging the full potential of the Azure environment. The university plans to implement DevOps practices and explore the capabilities of Azure Data Lakes.
“Our aggressive focus on building out our cloud environment has given us a valuable foundation that can be leveraged in any direction, from data warehousing and data analytics to hybrid configurations,” says Roe.
As Swinburne University continues to innovate and expand its digital capabilities, its partnership with Microsoft is set to deepen.
