Meeting the challenges of South African higher education on AWS

This article discusses how migrating education systems to AWS can improve their availability, reliability, and scalability, helping higher education institutions in South Africa overcome challenges like student registration bottlenecks, aging infrastructure, and limited resources.

Specifically, the article covers:

• The challenges faced by higher education institutions in South Africa, including underfunding, infrastructure problems, and high student unemployment rates.
• Adapt IT Education's ITS student information system and its migration to AWS, enabling improved performance, scalability, and reliability for managing student applications and registrations.
• The University of Limpopo's migration of ITS v4 to the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region, leading to significant operational efficiencies and improvements.
• Tshwane University of Technology's migration from on-premises to AWS to resolve capacity and availability issues, accelerated by a cybersecurity breach.
• The modernization of ITS into ITS Infinity, a cloud-native education platform designed to seamlessly scale on AWS services like Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing.
• The benefits of migrating education systems to AWS, including improved student experience, reduced administrative overhead, and better security posture.