About the Company
The MiraCosta Community College District is located in San Diego County along the Southern California coast, between Orange County to the north and the metropolitan area of San Diego to the south. The district is approximately 35 miles north of San Diego and 90 miles south of Los Angeles. The District includes the cities of Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Rancho Santa Fe, Solana Beach, Del Mar, the unincorporated areas of La Costa, Olivenhain, and portions of Carmel Valley and Camp Pendleton Marine Base. Approximately 20,000 students attend MCCCD.
The Vision and Challenge
When InterVision first engaged with MCCCD they had some state-of-the-art on-premise technology and a strong IT team to manage the district’s local datacenter. However, being a southern California-based college, MCCCD’s datacenter and applications were deemed vulnerable and difficult to recover from potential disasters. MCCCD contracted with InterVision to conduct a thorough assessment of its current datacenter and DR preparedness. MCCCD’s traditional tape backup system was too difficult and inefficient to function as a highly available disaster recovery (DR) strategy. For Tier 1 and 2 applications it would have been difficult for MCCCD to quickly restore service in the event of a serious outage or disaster. MCCCD determined that InterVision/AWS cloud services could help improve it through a multi-faceted strategy.
The Outcome
In the initial phase of the project, InterVision delivered a full DR assessment including a complete network scan, cloud architecture development services for MCCCD, and migration of MCCCD’s single sign-on (SSO) Portal Guard application to the cloud and configuration of it as a multi-site DR application.
The next step was to implement a tiered set of DR and migration strategies for each of MCCCD’s applications. The architecture included highly available applications migrated to the cloud, while others were placed in pilot light DR mode for near instant recovery, and other less critical applications were supported through an enhanced back-up and restore strategy in the AWS cloud. The InterVision/AWS strategy included the following elements:
- Development of new AWS cloud architecture for MCCCD
- Migration of specific on-premise applications into single high performing architecture to a redundant AWS test/dev, pilot and production environment.
- Pilot Light DR and Back-up & Restore DR to AWS for most other MCCCD applications
- SysOps and monitoring support
- Security
- Online/helpdesk support
InterVision’s delivery of a robust AWS environment supporting multi-site DR, pilot-light DR, and backup-restore DR architecture is an excellent example of how AWS can be used to produce a highly cost-effective DR solution that is extremely robust. This has allowed MCCCD to reach their business continuity and disaster recovery goals.
AWS Services utilized:
- Cloud formation
- Elasticity (EC2, ELB)
- ELK stack
- Stateless componentry
- Infrastructure automation (auto scaling)
- Docker container deployment
