Summary
UNSW College partnered with Arinco to modernise its IT infrastructure, streamline integrations and pave the way for future innovation. This transformation involved migrating 90 critical workloads to Microsoft Azure, implementing a robust integration platform for student and finance systems, and ensuring ongoing optimisation through Arinco’s Co-Ops Managed Services. This collaborative project resulted in enhanced operational efficiency, improved scalability and the successful rollout of DevOps best practices within UNSW College, positioning them for future innovation.
Background
UNSW College, owned by leading Australian university UNSW Sydney, provides pathways for international students to access higher education. With over 40,000 students from 130+ countries across two campuses, the College is committed to global knowledge-sharing, while delivering a seamless and high-quality student experience.
Whilst their current environment was meeting student needs, their commitment to enhanced student experience had revealed opportunities to build more scalable and adaptable infrastructure.
As part of its digital transformation strategy, UNSW College sought to modernise its IT infrastructure by migrating to the Azure Cloud, improving scalability, security and operational efficiency. The College aimed to increase collaboration across IT teams, expand visibility into their IT environments and consolidate technology infrastructure by leveraging the Microsoft stack.
Alongside this, the College was implementing a new application system, Studylink, and a new student management system, JR Plus, requiring seamless integration of student, enrolment and finance data.
Strategic goals
UNSW College set a strategic goal to migrate to the cloud, ensuring a seamless transition by doing it the right way, the first time. Having been presented with various pathways to the cloud, the College sought an experienced Microsoft Azure partner to guide them through their cloud and DevOps journey. Key priorities included strengthening security, modernising infrastructure wherever possible and responding quickly to business demands.
To achieve success, UNSW College needed a solution that provided better visibility and maintainability of their future Azure infrastructure, requiring Infrastructure as Code. Their on-premises challenges included End-of-Life (EOL) hardware and the need for extended support for SQL workloads.
Recognising that the ability to quickly create workloads in Azure would accelerate project delivery, UNSW College understood that DevOps practices were essential to their solution. With Azure at the core of their IT strategy, they aimed to boost their technical capabilities and enable software engineering teams to create environments swiftly, driving faster project delivery.
Beyond cloud migration, UNSW College also selected a new application system, Studylink, and a new student management system, JR Plus, as the foundation for their future operations. The challenge arose in integrating these two systems alongside other downstream systems, to ensure seamless data flow – particularly across student enrolment and financial processes. A key hurdle was the lack of a native invoicing and payment handling mechanism between the platforms. Without automation, finance teams manually allocated payments to 1,500 invoices per term, a very time-consuming process. UNSW College required a solution that could unify these systems, automate financial processes and enhance overall efficiency.
Solution
Seamless Azure migration to enable scalable growth
To ensure a smooth transition to Azure, Arinco implemented a robust cloud foundation built on best practices and advanced tools, enabling UNSW College to scale and secure their infrastructure effectively. The Azure Done Right™ (ADR) solution features an advanced repository of Bicep code and modules that adhere to DevOps best practices, while integrating Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for a structured migration approach.
Arinco’s ADR was used to deploy key pieces of Microsoft Azure infrastructure for UNSW College, including Azure Firewall, Azure Bastion, Application Gateway, Azure Blob Storage and ExpressRoute. This infrastructure laid the groundwork for future workload migrations into Azure.
The Arinco team worked closely with UNSW College to make necessary changes and updates to the Azure configuration, including some migration work outside of business hours. UNSW College’s collaborative culture was evident, as teams across departments, including Application Owners and Software Engineers, worked together to drive the migration forward.
Streamlined data integration to reduce manual workload
To streamline system integration, Arinco implemented a highly efficient Azure-based integration platform. This enabled real-time data transfer from Studylink to JR Plus via Webhook Events, ensuring all students who applied to UNSW College through Studylink were automatically created in JR Plus with complete student and enrolment information. This evolved into multiple processes spanning many API integrations across student, enrolment and finance domains.
To address invoicing challenges, Arinco developed an automated process that handled invoice creation, the application of sponsorships and scholarships to enrolments, and the automatic allocation of funds against the generated invoices. This automation significantly decreased manual workload, relieving UNSW College’s finance team from the task of manually allocating payments to 1,500 invoices each term.
Outcomes
The migration to Azure and the implementation of strategic solutions have driven notable improvements across UNSW College’s IT environment, delivering enhanced efficiency, streamlined processes, and substantial operational benefits. Key outcomes include:
- Successful migration of 90 Critical workloads: These workloads were seamlessly migrated into Azure with minimal disruption to staff and students, the result of a concentrated and collaborative effort between UNSW College and Arinco.
- Enhanced efficiency by decommissioning unused workloads: The migration presented opportunities to decommission unused workloads, reducing management overhead and freeing up resources for the team to focus on embedding DevOps practices.
- Improved IT access saving 4 hours per week: By replacing jump boxes with Azure Bastion, IT administrators can now access Azure Virtual Machines securely over HTTPS, eliminating the time previously spent configuring jump boxes.
- Robust security and DevOps integration: Production workloads are now protected using DevOps practices, strengthening the security posture of the environment. UNSW College continues to refine its Azure and DevOps practices, adding an Azure Cloud Lead to its team.
- Decommissioning of 46 on-premises servers: The shift to Azure led to the decommissioning of 46 on-premises servers, improving application performance in the cloud, simplifying infrastructure management and enabling future scalability.
- Seamless data integration across systems: The deployment of the Azure-based integration platform facilitates real-time data transfer between Studylink and JR Plus, ensuring smooth and uninterrupted data flow for student enrolment processes.
- Reduced manual effort with 1,500 automated invoices per term: Automation of invoicing and payment allocation processes has reduced the finance team’s workload, eliminating the need to manually allocate payments to 1,500 invoices each term, leading to more efficient operations.
- David Hull, Head of IT, UNSW College
Future Innovation
UNSW College continues to strengthen its partnership with Arinco, collaborating with Arinco’s Co-Ops Managed Services team to improve connectivity, policy management, monitoring, and overall enhancements within their Azure environment. Leveraging the Retainer model, UNSW College is also able to lean on Arinco experts to fill capacity gaps within their team.
With a modern and scalable environment, UNSW College is now exploring hybrid connectivity solutions and investigating the potential of OpenAI to enhance knowledge sharing among IT staff.
- David Hull, Head of IT, UNSW College
