The Wharton School

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, established in 1881, is the world’s oldest collegiate school of business. Back in 2004, all the school’s data services were housed on the Philadelphia campus. In 2010, Wharton School IT began transitioning its services to the cloud with cloud data storage as the first.  

The Wharton School is on the transition journey from running all the services on hardware on-premises to software-as-a-service in the cloud. The school’s deployment option includes AWS for the comprehensive computing infrastructure that they take advantage of. 

The Wharton School IT team needed to move the entire on-premises data center operation to the cloud. The school IT did not find it practical anymore to house two Philadelphia-based data centers running 500+ servers to be able to use the limited space on the urban campus for classrooms, and offices for faculty and staff. The school’s central IT team’s biggest challenge with AWS deployment was that every AWS VPC change required a network change that took at least one week for a turnaround time. They were struggling to find deployment options to help them move to cloud in a simplified, faster manner.  

Key requirements  

• Intelligent orchestration, visibility, and control for multi-cloud transit networking 
• Simplified and easy-to-use transit networking to reduce handling and managing AWS VPC requests 
• Manage secure cloud-to-internet connections
• Create simplicity rather than manage complexity
• Single pane of glass for operational visibility across the multi-cloud network 

Aviatrix cloud-native networking architecture has enabled The Wharton School to transition from hardware on-prem to cloud network environments smoothly. Aviatrix has helped The Wharton School to automate on-prem IT-to-cloud network connections, which has reduced the time it took to handle VPC deployment requests.  

The Wharton School has created AWS cloud network that securely segments various departments and student environments while allowing the school IT engineers the ability to monitor, support and upgrade AWS VPCs on demand. This allows The Wharton School IT team to utilize AWS APIs using Aviatrix transit networking solution to attach or detach the users to the VPC in just minutes.  

• Aviatrix cloud-native networking for AWS transit networking
• Aviatrix Intelligent Orchestration and Control to deliver global visibility, monitoring, and troubleshooting
• Secure site-to-cloud automation
• Aviatrix architecture enables roadmap to multi-cloud application environments 

From a business perspective, Aviatrix cloud-native networking helps The Wharton School IT is able to support new and existing users handle VPC deployments and other cloud network services quickly and with less human involvement. This results in a higher-quality user experience with less downtime.  Architecturally and operationally, The Wharton School IT team has been able to increase network visibility and control across AWS cloud, giving them the ability to troubleshoot much faster.  

• Cloud networking visibility and control 
• Simplified multi-cloud network orchestration
• Secure user environment segmentation
• Reduced time to handle VPC deployment and provisioning of other cloud network services requests