UCAS grabs award for cloud migration
UCAS grabs award for cloud migration
UCAS was triumphant at the inaugural UK Cloud Awards last week as it was rewarded for the successful migration of its student application system to the cloud in the summer of 2013.
The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) is responsible for British students’ applications for further education courses at universities and colleges. In 2013 the organisation opted to move its services to a scalable cloud environment so they would be more resilient when having to deal with periods of high traffic.
The migration to the cloud was completed in time for A Level results day on 15 August 2013, the day on which students discovered whether or not they got the required grades to gain offers to university or college.
On that day UCAS’ track system had to cope with a peak of 180 logins per second – prior to having access to scalable compute power via the cloud, the website would not have been able to process such high traffic; it would have crashed, leaving hundreds of thousands of students in the dark about their future in education.
As well as standing up to these intense surges in traffic, the new cloud-based system enabled universities and colleges to administer the admissions process via the cloud-hosted infrastructure databases and link systems. The migration has made UCAS’ management of the online applications – which come from over 650,000 students each year for courses at more than 350 institutions across the UK – a far more reliable and resilient process.
The successful implementation of the cloud solution saw UCAS win the Best Public Sector Project award at the first ever UK Cloud Awards last Wednesday (26 February).
Steve Jeffree, chief operating officer at UCAS, said: “We are delighted to have won the award which acknowledges the hard work that went into protecting students from a potential storm on results day.
“The success of the resilient cloud system is a tribute, not only to our IT team but to the universities and colleges who gave us their help and patience while we made vital technical changes ahead of our most important day.”
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