Curtin Uni moves to Microsoft Cloud

Curtin University has moved its email and collaboration apps to Microsoft’s Cloud, with students now having anywhere anytime access to university files thanks to the rollout.

CIO of the Perth-based university, Peter Nikoletatos, said the rollout of Microsoft Office 365 and live@edu has meant the IT team have been able to turn their attention to greater IT projects.

“Our students can access Curtin anywhere, anytime and that was the rationale behind it,” he said.

“It also removes us from the supply chain so we can only add value.”

After ditching the university’s ageing Linux system and rolling out Office 365, Nikoletatos said he chose to deploy live@edu with the help of Dimension Data rather than moving to Google for the project; a strategy aimed at continuing the university’s relationship with the vendor.

“We chose to go with Microsoft and not Google because we saw Microsoft as one of our strategic partners,” he said.

“It is in line with a number of other fairly significant projects we have in the works at the moment.”

With 10,000 email accounts still needing to be migrated to 365, Nikoletatos said the recent DNS outage of Microsoft’s Cloud services did not affect his confidence in using Cloud computing.

“Our students didn’t have email for about an hour, but the reality is most students use social media to communicate these days and emails are less important,” he said.

“While we can’t reduce the failure of a complete impact to an email system, what we can do is reduce the probability of the occurrence, and that is where the benefit occurs for us.”

With a plan to complete email migration by the end of the year, Nikoletatos said its game on for the university.

“Now it is a question of rolling out to order,” he said.

“We anticipate by the end of the year to have most of the university across to Microsoft 365, and this will be a significant increase in size.”

Earlier this year, the university announced plans to migrate to a managed version of Blackboard, as well as firing up its new Vblock infrastructure from EMC, VMware and Cisco.

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