Singapore Institute of Technology migrates to the cloud with Commvault technology

The Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) is a perfect example of what happens when a large organisation migrates most of its data from a traditional physical data centre into the cloud.

Currently headquartered at an interim campus in Singapore, SIT also has five satellite campuses, one at each of Singapore’s five polytechnics. As a fairly young university looking forward to its new permanent campus to be completed in about five years’ time, the university already is facing the challenge of growing demands for data storage and processing.

The university was faced with the unusual challenge of maintaining a data centre on its interim campus that was near its full capacity for rack space, power and air-conditioning. Capital expenditure on physical expansions typically make more sense if an organisation expects to be in the same location for longer than five years.

Moving to a cloud-first strategy comprises more than purchasing data storage capacity and copying files from hard disks to a public cloud. It involves the collaborative assistance of every division and department of the organisation, and the right strategy and partners to make the process a smooth and successful one, says Commvault, which supported SIT on its migration journey to the AWS cloud.

SIT spent two months studying how to classify and codify its data and applications before moving to the cloud. The process analysed whether different types of data were suitable for cloud storage. Commvault helped to eliminate risks by classifying and understanding SIT data so that sensitive data would not be stored in the cloud, for instance.

"Most organisations get too caught up with the ‘cloud-first’ approach and jump right in without taking the imperative measure of knowing and understanding their data. Without clarity on data, the migration to cloud can create more problems than before, including compliance issues and unauthorised access to sensitive information," noted Mark Bentkower, Director of Solutions Marketing, Asia Pacific, Commvault.

While the measured approach can take up more time, the analysis enables companies to structure their new solution to their advantage. Benefits can include better efficiency, cost effectiveness, ease of moving hybrid cloud workloads, and compliance, he explained.

Commvault's managed migration was accomplished while keeping SIT's servers ‘live’ in both locations, thanks to the coordination of tasks between applications and infrastructure automatically, and in real time. "With this in place, all data can be protected, even on a live system, while still meeting recovery objective metrics," Bentkower said.

"Businesses often forget that they should be achieving the same or even better RTOs and RPOs* on the cloud as compared to on-premises. The importance of a robust backup and recovery solution remains across all environments," Bentkower elaborated.

The bulk of SIT’s data migration and replication was accomplished using AWS Storage Services and Commvault technology. The university found it was cost-effective to back up data to AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), and also leveraged Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) Snapshots, which offered the same RTO/RPO standards as in the on-premise SIT environment. The Snapshots helped eliminate off-site replication costs, while enabling SIT to meet its service standards.

"From a business aspect, SIT could upgrade internal processes and enhance IT infrastructures efficiently without the need for additional steps that would have been taken if they implemented a completely new solution. Our solution integrates seamlessly with AWS, providing SIT with more ease and accessibility. We’re happy to strengthen this relationship and become their trusted data management partner across both on-premises and in the cloud," said Bentkower.

SIT has given a strong indication that it will expand its storage expansion plans to other cloud services such as Amazon Glacier, and using other Commvault features such as data classification to help identify the right kinds of files for cloud storage.

*RTO is about a targeted time to recover from a disaster. RPO refers to an amount of time taken for disaster recovery that, if exceeded, the business could be irreparably damaged.