Bob and I did a brief update on where the OIT is in terms of cloud strategy and the progress we have made with our IaaS provider of choice, Amazon Web Services.  It was essentially a highly summarized, non-technical version of the presentation we gave in D.C. earlier this year.

The most interesting thing that came out of the update was a follow-on conversation with one of the non-technical users on campus.  This person was not aware of the implications of moving Conductor and its associated sites to AWS.  We explained that her departmental website is a Conductor site, and as such, she is directly benefiting from the improved performance and availability.

It was in the context of this conversation that the beauty of what we are doing struck me.  Functionally, end users should not even realize that the infrastructure running their web presence or line of business applications has transitioned to AWS.  If well-executed, these users should continue to be oblivious to the changes being made, on their behalf and in their best interest.

The fact this person had no realization that anything changed is a testament to our success to date, because as stated previously, the performance essentially doubled for roughly half the cost.  All in the best interest of the University, allowing us to focus our efforts on initiatives which are core to the institutional mission.

Very, very excited about what is to come.

Onward!