Logicalis migrates Western Sydney University to Microsoft Azure

Logicalis Australia has successfully facilitated Western Sydney University's (WSU) transition to Microsoft Azure, marking a significant milestone in the university's digital transformation journey. The migration was undertaken as part of WSU’s strategic initiative to enhance its digital capabilities, ensuring a cutting-edge environment that supports research, university engagement, and innovation.

Western Sydney University, with over 47,000 students and 6,000 staff spread across 13 campuses in Sydney, is one of Australia’s leading higher education institutions. Faced with the impending end-of-life of its existing data centre, the university was in urgent need of a solution to migrate its critical production workloads. The university identified Microsoft Azure Public Cloud as the optimal platform for this transformation, offering faster deployment times, agile development, flexible spending options, and improved security and scalability.

To achieve these objectives, the university issued a tender to find a partner capable of executing this complex migration. Logicalis Australia, renowned for its agnostic approach and strong partnership with Microsoft, was chosen for the project. As a certified Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP), Logicalis was well-equipped to meet the university’s requirements.

Logicalis Australia’s first step was to perform a comprehensive analysis of potential solutions, ensuring that the university’s specific needs were addressed with precision. The result was an enterprise-scale Azure Landing Zone designed in alignment with WSU’s future cloud strategy. This scalable, modular architecture was built on Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework, providing a robust foundation for hosting workloads in the cloud and ensuring that the university’s digital infrastructure could evolve with future advancements in Azure.

The success of the project was largely attributed to the close collaboration between Logicalis Australia and key stakeholders at WSU, including C-suite executives and IT departments. Logicalis implemented a shared services model that allowed the university’s IT team to scale operations effectively while maintaining strong governance. This new platform now supports a range of student services, including the Western Mobile App, and delivers several key benefits:

• Agile development and deployment: The migration has streamlined processes, accelerating application deployment and reducing operational efforts.
• Cost reduction: The university has achieved significant annual savings in IT operational and MSP costs.
• Enhanced security and resiliency: Advanced security measures have been put in place to mitigate cyber threats and ensure operational stability.
• Continuous improvement: The university now has access to ongoing innovations, ensuring the agility and effectiveness of the new solution.
• The collaboration between Logicalis Australia and WSU has not only transformed the university’s digital landscape but also earned Logicalis Australia the title of Microsoft’s 2024 Azure Partner of the Year for Australia and New Zealand. The engagement model developed through this partnership is scalable and replicable, demonstrating its potential to benefit sectors beyond higher education.

Reflecting on the success of the project, Karina Foley, IT Leader at Western Sydney University, expressed her satisfaction with Logicalis Australia’s approach. “Logicalis Australia developed an innovative solution with meticulous planning, detailed analysis, and a collaborative approach with key stakeholders at Western Sydney University. This was the best IT project that I have ever worked on. One of the reasons for this was the way they adapted to meet our team where they were at, adopting some of our practices and processes to run the project in a way that was comfortable for everyone,” said Foley.