NMIMS Cuts Running Costs by 28%, Enjoys Increases Performance By Migrating Applications From Azure To AWS Cloud Services

Established in 1981, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) is a deemed-to-be University of global repute and a leading name for Management education in India. It is striving to become a globally admired university by 2030. NMIMS prides itself on consistently maintaining high-quality academic and research work with top national and global faculty members. Today, it has grown to 107 schools and 16 disciplines. At the highest level, national bodies, such as NAAC and NBA, accredit this multidisciplinary and multi-campus (across cities) institution. AACSB accredits its management institution, and AMBA accredits its Bengaluru and Hyderabad programs. The NMIMS academic infrastructure is at par with the best in the world today.

NMIMS was running its Learning Management System (LMS) workload on Microsoft Azure. It was run on a single server with challenges related to application performance besides incurring very high costs. LMS, being crucial in course creation and managing administration, tracking, reporting, and delivery of courses, its performance and cost-effectiveness were top priorities for the institution.

The client was exploring a more suitable cloud computing service provider to address the existing challenges and signed up with a partner who could support the migration process.

Rapyder Cloud Solutions, an Advanced AWS Consulting partner with expertise and experience in successful cloud migration services, was chosen by the client for migration and implementation.

Rapyder’s expert team of Cloud Architects had several discovery sessions with the client and did a complete analysis to understand the latter’s requirement for the migration. This was followed by Rapyder’s team conceptualizing and stitching a powerful and customized solution around AWS services for the task. The team helped migrate the client’s application from Azure to AWS, tested them on the new location, and consolidated all the web applications on AWS.

The robust solution configured and implemented by Rapyder’s team for a successful migration to AWS is captured below:

• Having understood the need for future scaling on the cloud infrastructure, the Web and DB layers were split to facilitate scaling at a later stage and avoid any single-point failure.
• Application Load Balancers supporting content-based routing and applications running in containers were placed in front of the web layer as the first line of defense. It also provides additional visibility into the health of the target instances and containers and takes care of bad requests coming from the users.
• Custom metrics were configured on each server to track the utilization of all the infrastructure metrics.
• Amazon GuardDuty, the threat detection service, was implemented to intelligently monitor for malicious activities of the AWS account at the network level.
• Finally, a dry run was performed to ensure the application migration was successful.