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From Data Centers to Cloud Excellence

Unlocking University-Wide Operational Efficiency

Anna Vakulick

Interim VP of IT and CIO

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The Illusion of Stability

Like many higher-ed institutions we were managing technical debt masquerading as stability.

  • Aging Data Centers
  • Reactive Operations
  • Poor Resiliency
  • Fragmented Intelligence

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The Breaking Point

A “Cloud First” strategy on paper isn’t enough when reality strikes.

You’ll never hear a student say they chose their university because they run a top notch data center

This incident rebooted our passive strategy into an actionable initiative: Accelerate to the Cloud

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The hardest part of earning a degree shouldn’t be navigating administrative processes

  • The “GW Shuffle”
  • The Petition Graveyard
  • Staff Burnout

The Experience

“We want to be like the Apple Store, but today we are the DMV”

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Moving infrastructure out of the data center wouldn’t solve our business problems. We had to fundamentally change how IT serves the university from the foundation.

Framing the Transformation

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Pillar 1: Data Lake

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Centralizing Institutional Intelligence

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Crawl, Walk, Run - Leaned on AWS but took off the training wheels.

Pillar 2: Pacing the Acceleration

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A 30-year-old “GW version of Banner” with customizations, workarounds, and bolt-ons severely limited our agility.

Pillar 3: Modernizing the Core ERP

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Getting to the other side

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80%

of migrations complete

361

VM’s will be decommission

99%

Carbon Footprint reduction on 60% of our infrastructure

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Practical Insights

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Start with a strong vision and charter

Building a Cloud Center Of Excellence

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Scope then Scale

Building a Cloud Center Of Excellence

  • Assign the right authority
  • These are hats people are wearing on this matrix team
  • This is a two way role – bringing knowledge to the CCoE, sharing information back to their home team

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Design and Run with Rightsizing in mind: We don’t need to architect for peak load. We need to architect to match demand.

Define Roles and Responsibilities: The Cloud team is responsible for running as close to the margin as possible. The Financial team sees the impact.

Tagging for Visibility: Focusing on getting tagging right so it creates better service cost visibility

Certified Expertise: Upskilling our team with FinOps certifications to ensure

continuous financial transparency and waste reduction.

Moving to the cloud changes how we run our services. The costs are no longer “sunk” – it’s a utility charge with a meter. Behavior has to change.

Implementing FinOps

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You don’t migrate an enterprise in a weekend. You have to discover, plan, pilot, adjust, and build a cadence.

Managing Large-Scale Migrations

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Don’t guess. Use automated tools to discover your environment and map dependencies. Define your service roadmap.

Start small. Start with Test environments. Move low-risk workloads to build the confidence and institutional trust.

Test in the Cloud without disrupting production environments. Build in hypercare post cut-over.

Create your Runbook. Don’t Deviate.

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How do you show the impact an effort could have when it comes to automating or streamlining work? �This is the challenge of measuring the elusive “impact” or “efficiency”.

Measure Institutional Impact

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Even saving 25 minutes per month for every employee is $2,000,000 in Institutional ROI

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The technology is the easy part. We had to transition our thinking from “Build” to “Provide”.

Navigating Cultural Shifts

Conducting honest baseline skills inventories creates targeted upskilling paths and fosters an agile, growth mindset

ADKAR

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Thank you!