Modernize Your Institution's IT Infrastructure | Securely, on AWS
From K-12 school districts to research universities and public libraries, education institutions are under pressure to do more with tightening IT budgets, securing student data, supporting hybrid and online learning, and running enterprise applications on teams built for yesterday’s on-premises world. PureData Cloud migrates and manages your institution’s workloads on AWS: cutting infrastructure costs by up to 40%, meeting FERPA and COPPA requirements, and giving your IT teams the scalable cloud foundation that modern education demands.
The Education IT Challenge Why Institutions Are Moving to AWS
Education institutions manage an exceptionally complex technology stack, student information systems, learning management platforms, research computing environments, administrative portals, communication tools, and an ever-expanding catalogue of third-party edtech applications. Most of this infrastructure is siloed, on-premises, and expensive to maintain. AWS cloud gives institutions the elasticity to handle enrollment surges and research spikes, the security architecture to protect student and faculty data, and the cost governance tools to operate within ESEA, Title IV, and state-allocated IT budgets.
- Who We Serve
Sectors We Serve
SIS migration, FERPA safeguards, EdTech integration, multi-campus AWS
Research computing, HPC on AWS, multi-department governance, VPC isolation
Dual enrollment systems, workforce dev platforms, AWS FinOps for lean IT
Simulation lab cloud, LMS migration, accreditation-ready compliance
Digital archive migration, patron data protection, AWS-hosted catalog systems
SaaS architecture on AWS, multi-tenant data isolation, FERPA-safe product builds
- Core Services
What We Deliver to Institutions
End-to-end AWS cloud services for every level of education from district-wide cloud readiness assessments to full university research infrastructure migration, managed operations, and compliance-aligned security architecture.
How a Regional University Reduced IT Costs by 41% with AWS Cloud Migration
Education Sector: Public University (14,000 students, 3 campuses)
Scenario: A 14,000-student state university running aging on-premises Banner ERP, Blackboard LMS, and an on-premises HPC cluster across three campuses, with a 6-person central IT team and $1.2M annual hardware refresh budget consuming 55% of the IT operating budget.
Challenge: Banner ERP performance degradation during peak registration periods causing student and faculty frustration. On-premises HPC cluster at capacity — research teams waiting weeks for compute time. No central cloud governance framework. Annual hardware refresh consuming majority of IT budget with no flexibility for new initiatives.
Solution: PureData Cloud executed a 16-week phased AWS migration: Banner ERP re-hosted on AWS RDS and EC2 with auto-scaling for registration peaks, Blackboard migrated to AWS with CloudFront CDN for distributed campus access, and an AWS ParallelCluster research HPC environment deployed with Graviton3 instances. A university-wide AWS Landing Zone with FERPA-aligned guardrails was established across all three campuses.
Outcome: Annual IT infrastructure cost reduced by 41%. Zero ERP performance issues during fall and spring registration — first in four years. Research computing queue wait time eliminated — researchers provision clusters on-demand. IT staff reclaimed 18 hours per week previously spent on hardware maintenance. HPC costs reduced 60% versus on-premises due to pay-per-use model.
- AWS Landing Zone with FERPA-aligned SCPs across 3 campuses and 14 departments
- Banner ERP migration to AWS RDS Aurora with auto-scaling for peak registration loads
- Blackboard LMS migration with CloudFront distribution and sub-2-second global page loads
- AWS ParallelCluster HPC environment — 200+ vCPUs on-demand, Graviton3 instances
- AWS KMS encryption, Macie PII scanning, and CloudTrail audit logging across all environments
- Monthly FinOps dashboard — cost per department, per research project, per enrollment period
What We Deliver
AI-driven audit of your existing infrastructure, dependencies, and workloads to produce a prioritized migration plan with TCO analysis.
Lift-and-shift, re-platform, or re-architect — we execute migrations using AWS Migration Hub with zero-disruption cutover strategies.
Terraform and AWS CloudFormation templates that make your entire infrastructure version-controlled, repeatable, and auditable.
Continuous rightsizing, Reserved Instance planning, and Savings Plans strategies that eliminate cloud waste on day one.
AWS Well-Architected security reviews, IAM hardening, and compliance frameworks for HIPAA, SOC 2, and PCI-DSS.
24/7 proactive monitoring, incident response, and ongoing optimization — your dedicated AWS operations team.
Our Migration Process
Best Practices We Apply
- AWS Well-Architected Framework
- Zero-downtime cutover
- Immutable infrastructure
- GitOps workflows
- Least-privilege IAM
- Multi-AZ resilience
- FinOps governance
- Automated compliance checks
- Disaster recovery testing
- Landing Zone setup
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Frequently Asked Questions
We architect FERPA technical safeguards into every layer of the AWS environment from day one of the migration: network isolation via VPC, AES-256 encryption at rest via AWS KMS, TLS 1.3 encryption in transit, AWS Macie automated PII detection across all S3 data stores, least-privilege IAM roles mapped to institutional staff roles, and immutable CloudTrail audit logs. We also help institutions update their vendor data processing agreements and data governance policies to reflect the new cloud environment — critical for satisfying FERPA’s written agreement requirements.
Yes — and this is one of AWS’s strongest value propositions for universities. Administrative workloads (ERP, SIS, LMS) run on right-sized EC2 instances with auto-scaling for peak periods. Research and HPC workloads run on dedicated high-performance instances (Graviton3, HPC6a) with FSx for Lustre storage and AWS ParallelCluster orchestration. Both environments share a common security baseline and governance framework, but are network-isolated from each other. Researchers get on-demand compute without competing with administrative systems.
We designed our education migration methodology around lean IT teams. We handle all technical migration execution — your team’s role during migration is approval and validation, not execution. After go-live, our managed AWS support service provides 24/7 monitoring and incident response, monthly reporting, and proactive optimization. Your staff stays in control at the governance and vendor management level. Most education IT teams report spending 15–20 fewer hours per week on infrastructure management after switching to managed AWS operations.
Let’s Build Something That Works for Your Business
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