In line with its multifaceted “University of the Future” plan, La Trobe University is moving workloads to the cloud.
The plan, which involved the university working with Optus, was developed after the start of Covid-19 made it clear that La Trobe needed to modernise its internal business procedures.
La Trobe has launched a new contact centre and is also pursuing a connectivity plan that prioritises wireless technology.
The institution said that 80 percent of its core server and storage infrastructure is now on a VMware cloud hosted on AWS, replacing its end-of-life data centres, which would have required “significant financial investments.”
It now employs a more adaptable software-defined data centre architecture that offers improved business continuity.
A backup-as-a-service platform protects the cloud infrastructure, the existing on-premises infrastructure, and upcoming public cloud workloads. The change required moving 500 virtual machines to the cloud.
Optus’ Cloud Contact Centre, which is based on the NICE CX One digital interaction platform, was used to move the university’s contact centre to the cloud as well.
In the cloud-based contact centre, agents can be placed wherever there is connectivity.
In order to upgrade the network, 4000 Cisco wi-fi 6 access points were deployed across seven campuses using a software-defined network architecture, with network security being handled by the same vendor.
According to Optus, this ensures that students have the same connectivity experience regardless of the campus from which they are logging in.
