Oracle / PeopleSoft to AWS Project

• New environment creation goes from months to hours facilitating efficiencies in deleting inactive environments and dynamically creating environments as needed.   
• Accelerate time-to-value for specific application efforts/sprints by increasing infrastructure agility. 
• Infrastructure-as-code for SIS brings the following benefits: 
  • Significantly enhanced change-control since Infrastructure can be managed as code.  This is particularly helpful for this large, complex ERP system where small variations in implementations can be difficult to track down. 
  • Enhanced DevOps coordination and collaboration via the transition to gitops. 
  • Infrastructure team spends more time on high value-add tasks rather than manual deployment and provisioning tasks. 
  • Facilitate the development of strategic skills. 
  • Cost avoidance of an additional FTE required to manage the large, complex infrastructure without the advancement of infrastructure-as-code modernization. 
  • Enhanced security be reducing the lag between PeopleTools releases.  The project footprint for a PeopleTools upgrades and other “complete rebuild” scenarios such as operating system upgrades, will be reduced by 40%. 
• Additional opportunities to leverage cloud capabilities to achieve non-functional improvements (RPO/RTO, Performance, WAF, etc.). For example, we are able to provision just what we need and autoscale for beginning of terms, grade posting, and other key times. 

• Operational Excellence 

This change aligns with the university’s Strategic Plan by enhancing operational excellence by applying Lean/DevOps principles and leveraging automation to accelerate time to value, reduce variation/defects.  

With the cancellation of the Workday Student project, there is a need to reinvest in the Student Information System and rebuild our capability to patch and enhance more frequently and manage and modernize SIS as a core system.  Without this significant investment in automation, increased staffing would be required to achieve baseline levels of agility needed to achieve quarterly patching.

Fiscal Impact 

Cost Avoidance: Additional staffing (1.5 FTE) would be required to resume SIS quarterly patching of PeopleTools in FY25 and to support the additional developers added to rightsized operations as part of Student Stabilization.  Patching was significantly slowed as resources were pulled to support new services stood up during the Workday project. 

Storage/Compute Savings: Leveraging elasticity to minimize day-to-day compute and automatically scale for peak usage.   Leveraging agility to destroy and create environments as needed and shutdown environments while not in use. 

Note: Scope is limited to Items moving to AWS.  There will still be other ongoing on-premises costs.  To improve comparability between years, the following retired environments have been excluded: CS9RPT, HCCVOSU, and CS9DWQA.   

Students, faculty, and staff will all benefit from a more robust, secure, and agile Student Information System Infrastructure aligned to the core objective of operational excellence.

• (This is a continuation of significant work begun FY23, environments and integration continue to be delivered.) 
• October Go-live of the production environment 
• All remaining on-premises environments to be decommissioned FY24 

Enterprise Applications (Sanbe) and key business partners for the SIS. 

• Research Technology and Infrastructure (Breon) 
• Enterprise Applications (Sanbe) 
• Digital Security and Trust – IdM, Information Protection (Nagle) 
• Administration – Release Management (Muhn) 

• # of on-prem systems retired 
• # of users accessing SIS from new platform 
• Cost savings