Ellucian

Inspired by the transformative impact of education, Ellucian develops software and services that power the essential work of higher education institutions around the globe. Ellucian works with more than 2,500 institutions in more than 50 countries—enhancing operations and enriching the experience for over 20 million students.

Ellucian runs their software and services in their “Cloud Network Architecture 2.0” environment, which is completely cloud native. Initially based on AWS, Ellucian plans to expand to a multi-cloud architecture in a near future.

Ellucian was under pressure to migrate away from on-premises data centers into the cloud within a short timeframe, while building a scalable and future-proof architecture. Virtual routers and firewalls from traditional network vendors were not scaling appropriately.

Key requirements:

• Deploy a global cloud networking architecture that scales for new properties, applications and clouds.
• Simplified cloud network orchestration, segmentation, visibility and control.
• Be multi-cloud capable from Day-1.
• High performance encryption.
• For compliance with U.S. and Europe (GDPR) privacy laws, each educational institution customer must be in its own VPC. Every of those VPCs has to be segmented from all others.

Ellucian leverages Aviatrix to manage, secure, scale, and monitor their multi-cloud software and services.

• Aviatrix unified architecture across all cloud types. It is deployed on AWS today.
• Aviatrix intelligent orchestration and control to deliver global cloud network visibility, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• Aviatrix 20 Gbps high-performance encryption with low-latency enables Ellucian to use shared services in AWS regions that act as core regions, with other regions requiring less services leveraging the core regions.
• Aviatrix User VPN for worldwide developers, contractors, and partners of Ellucian to get global access to resources, with secure profile-based access control.
• Infrastructure as code: deployment is as programmatic as possible, either directly via the Aviatrix APIs, or via the Aviatrix Terraform provider.
• Aviatrix default segmentation of VPCs, with transit networking for easy VPC communication when required.
• Aviatrix provides a single transit hub for all VPCs, combined with site-to-cloud for connectivity back to Ellucian’s on-premises data center resources.

• Aviatrix native network architecture enabled Ellucian to meet the challenging timelines to migrate from on-premises data centers into the cloud while maintaining regulatory compliance.
• The operations team became more efficient thanks to the centralized visibility and troubleshooting provided by the Aviatrix.
• With a solid cloud-networking architecture in place, Ellucian is ready moving to a multi-cloud network. Ellucian will not have to go back and re-invent the architecture when expanding to new cloud types – but simply build on the architecture they have put in place.
• Aviatrix is part of Ellucian’s enterprise cloud strategy: multi-network backbone, an architecture for all intra- and inter-cloud connectivity, and routing and security policies to meet regulatory compliance.