Introduction
As universities deal with the challenging situation of growing in Post-COVID era there is need for leveraging digital transformation for their computing assets, distributed workforce across multiple campuses, global students and innovative learning & research programs. This requires a technology led program to make education frictionless by leveraging cloud based solutions in a pre-packaged model covering University IT, Learning Needs and Research Computing. Working closely with the AWS partnership in trying to make Digital Learning frictionless, Relevance Lab is bringing a unique new concept to the market of University in a Box, that extends a self-contained Cloud Portal with basic applications to power the needs of a university. This new, radical and innovative concept is based on the idea of a school, college and university going from zero (no AWS account) to cloud native in hours. This enables the Cloud “Mission with Speed” for a mature, secure and comprehensive adoption very fast.
A typical university starting on their cloud journey needs a self-service interactive interface with user logins, tracking and offering the deployed products, provide actions for connectivity after assets are deployed, ability to have lifecycle interactions in UI of Cloud Portal with no need to go to the AWS Console and with a comprehensive view of cost and budgets tracking.
The key building blocks for University in a Box comprise the following:
- University Catalog - Cloud Formation Templates useful to Higher Education packaged as Service Catalog Products
- Self-Service Cloud Portal for University IT users to order items with security, governance and budget tracking
- Easy onboarding model to get started with a hosted option or self-managed instances of Cloud Portal
Leverage existing investments in AWS and standard products the foundational pieces includes a Portfolio of useful software and architectures often used by universities.
- Deploy Control Tower
- Deploy GuardDuty
- Deploy Security Hub
- Deploy VPC + VPN
- Deploy AD Extension
- Deploy Web Applications SSO, Shibboleth, Drupal
- Deploy FSx File Server
- Deploy S3 Buckets for Backup Software
- Deploy HIPAA workload
- Deploy Other solutions as needed, Workspaces, Duo, Appstream, etc
- WordPress Reference Architecture
- Drupal Reference Architecture
- Moodle Reference Architecture
- Shibboleth Reference Architecture
How to Setup and Use University in a Box?
The RLCatalyst Cloud Portal solution enables a University with no existing Cloud to deploy a self-service model for internal IT and consume standard applications seamlessly.
The following diagram explains the deployment architecture of the solution.
University Users, Roles and Organization Planning
Planning for university users, roles and organizations requires mapping to existing departments, IT and non-IT roles and empowering users for self-service without compromising on security or governance. This can vary between organizations but common patterns are encountered as explained below.
- Common Delegation use cases for University IT:
- Delegate a product from a Lead Architect to Helpdesk, or a less skilled co-worker
- Delegate a product from Lead Architect or Central IT, to another IT group, DBA team, Networking Team, Analytics Team
- Delegate a product to another University Department – Academic, Video, etc
- Delegate a product to a researcher or faculty member
Setup Planning Considerations on Deployment and Onboarding
Standard Catalog for University in a Box Leverages AWS Provided Standard Architecture Best Practices
The basic setup leverages AWS Well Architected framework extensively and builds on AWS Reference Architecture as detailed below. Sharing a sample Products Preview List based on AWS Provided University Catalog under Open Source Program.
Summary
University in a Box is a powerful example of a specific business problem solved with leverage of Cloud integrated with existing customer specific use cases and easy deployment options to save time, money and achieve quick maturity.
For Universities, colleges and schools trying to use AWS Cloud infrastructure, applications and self-service models the solution can bring significant cost, effort and compliance benefits to help them focus on “Driving Effective Learning” than worrying about enabling cloud infrastructure, basic day to day applications and delegation of tasks to achieve scale. With a combination of pre-built solution and a managed services model to handhold customers with a full lifecycle of development, enhancement and support services, Relevance Lab can be your trusted partner for digital learning enablement.
For demo video, please click here.