University of Newcastle migrates its data to the cloud

The University of Newcastle claims to have become the first university in Australia to fully migrate its digital data to the cloud — the next major step in its ongoing digital transformation.

Chief Information Officer Anthony Molinia said the project would give the institution a competitive advantage by improving services and cybersecurity for its staff and students.

“A modern university needs to be agile, and one of the core advantages of a cloud-first digital platform is the capacity to respond and implement solutions quickly,” Molinia said.

“With a cloud platform, infrastructure solutions and tools such as secure data storage — that would normally be procured over several weeks — can be provisioned within minutes. This will place the university at an enormous advantage throughout the year.

“We have already been able to leverage the benefits of the scalability and flexibility of cloud at the most critical time in recent digital history,” he continued.

“2020 has become the year of disruption and our early adoption of cloud-based services, communication and collaboration channels was key to the university’s successful pivot to remote learning and working in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

All applications and data targeted for the cloud migration were moved in just over nine months, instead of the average 18 months a migration of this nature would typically take to perform.

Vice Chancellor Professor Alex Zelinsky said he was proud of the overall achievement.

“We’re thrilled to be the first university in Australia to make this move to the cloud — this is a massive achievement and will mean we’re at the cutting edge of cloud technology,” Professor Zelinsky said.

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