Overview
The National University of Colombia, one of Colombia’s largest and most prestigious academic institutions, undertook a strategic digital modernization initiative to enhance the performance, scalability, and reliability of its core systems. With growing demands from students, faculty, and administrative stakeholders, the university turned to AWS to build a future-ready, cloud-based infrastructure capable of supporting its academic mission.
Challenge
The university faced several pressing challenges that hindered its ability to deliver responsive and reliable digital services:
- Legacy Infrastructure: Existing systems were built on outdated technologies, limiting flexibility and making it difficult to scale with growing institutional demands.
- Growing Demand for Digital Services: Increasing need for robust administrative and academic platforms to support institutional growth.
- Operational Reliability: Maintaining continuous availability of essential systems during the modernization process was critical to avoid disruptions to academic and administrative functions.
Solution
To address these challenges, the university partnered with Blend and AWS to implement a robust and scalable cloud transformation strategy:
- Cloud Migration of Core Systems: Mission-critical academic and administrative platforms were migrated to AWS, providing a more reliable and elastic infrastructure foundation.
- Optimized Performance with EC2, RDS, and CloudFront: Key workloads were migrated to Amazon EC2 for compute scalability, Amazon RDS for managed database operations, and Amazon CloudFront to deliver faster access to academic portals and services.
- Scalable and Secure Data Storage with S3 and EFS: Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) were implemented to ensure secure, scalable, and efficient data storage, improving access for users across campuses.
This modernization enabled the university to serve a larger number of users with greater efficiency while laying the foundation for future innovation.
Impact
The transformation significantly improved institutional performance and user satisfaction:
- Improved Accessibility: Enabled better access to administrative and academic platforms for students and staff.
- System Reliability: Achieved 99.99% uptime for core systems, ensuring continuous availability of digital services.
- Optimized User Experience: Reduced response times for essential processes, supporting both academic and administrative activities.
- Increased Capacity: Supported 2x more concurrent users without performance degradation.
- Modernized Services: Over 200 services were re-architected or enhanced to run on the new AWS-powered infrastructure.
Key Data Points
99.99%
system uptime post-migration
![]()
200+
services modernized across academic and administrative domains
![]()
2x
increase in concurrent users without performance loss
![]()
.png)
