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Abertay University were looking to move to a modern cloud platform in order to strengthen its reputation for delivering leading edge ethical hacking, computer gaming, business and social science degrees as well as enhancing the resilience and efficiency of it’s IT hosting model.

The Challenge:As part of their Digital Strategy, the University wanted to migrate its systems and services to Azure quickly, efficiently and securely. In doing so, the University wanted to reduce or eliminate the need for a physical data centre by minimising the amount of systems remaining on premise after migration. Also, a large proportion of the infrastructure estate was nearing end of life and Abertay wanted to strengthen their cyber security protection given the increasing risk profile experienced by the UK HE organisations.

The Solution: One the early deliverables was to run a virtual managed classroom proof of concept to demonstrate how Azure could deliver solutions that benefited students. Azure Lab Services was chosen to support groups of ethical hacking students, allowing them to spin up VMs on demand but within a controlled and managed environment. The joint team implemented an Azure hybrid cloud environment and Landing Zone, that wherever possible utilised native Azure capabilities such as Azure Firewall, Backup, Bastion, Defender for Cloud and Azure Sentinel Threat Monitoring. 

The Outcome: “From the outset CoreAzure used their considerable experience of successfully transitioning universities to the cloud to demonstrate how the use of the Microsoft cloud platform could positively impact our IT services. Improving agility, reducing cybersecurity risk and our carbon footprint by decreasing our campus data centre capacity significantly are key objectives of the programme. At the end of the project, we will have a modern, secure IT infrastructure capable of delivering a wide range of innovative digital services to our students and staff.”  Frazer Greig - Head of IT and Corporate Services.

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