Since the fire on the roof of Hale Library in May 2018, the Division of Information Technology (IT) has undertaken the goal of modernizing our data center with a cloud-first strategy. One of the largest projects was moving more than 800 K-State websites to the cloud.
Staff from the Division of Communications and Marketing and IT have spent countless hours planning, preparing, testing, and retesting. While some tweaking continues, the move is a great success. The benefits of moving to the cloud include disaster recovery/business continuity, scaling, resiliency, and reduced downtime.
After the Hale Library fire, bringing the K-State websites back up took some scrambling and all-nighters. Moving the websites to the cloud assures access to K-State’s web presence even in the face of a disaster. The cloud also allows us to scale quickly. Imagine a website that gets massive amounts of traffic — such as utility websites after an outage. With this migration, K-State can scale up faster to ensure that traffic to a website is accommodated.
“By moving to the cloud, we are better prepared for crisis situations or those times when we need to scale rapidly,” said Jeff Morris, vice president for communications and marketing. “For example, when the Hale Library fire occurred, we were forced to migrate our entire website to the cloud under duress. This required extraordinary effort over four days. With the latest migration, we have much more redundancy should a disaster such as a fire occur. One lesson we learned is that access to mission-critical applications is curtailed if the main website is down. In addition, we have the ability to rapidly increase our bandwidth for times when there are dramatic spikes in web traffic.”
“This major initiative has allowed us to take one more step towards realizing our cloud-first vision,” commented Gary Pratt, CIO. “Knowing the significant issues we experienced during the Hale fire, we knew that we had to take advantage of a very negative situation and modernize our data center systems. This approach allowed us to put in place better, more resilient enterprise systems.”
To learn more about K-State’s move to a cloud-first strategy, view the IT Strategic Plan.
