King's College London moves their Student Information System (SITS) to be run by Tribal as a service from the cloud.
Tribal and King's College London (KCL) have delivered a significant SITS Cloud migration project which ends over two decades of KCL running SITS on premise. This is the first SITS Cloud migration undertaken in the UK, with a further three universities currently migrating and a dozen more holding Cloud Discovery Workshops to assess and scope their transitions.
The challenge KCL faced was providing the most appropriate systems to deliver the best possible experience for its students but a global pandemic was not on the university's risk register… On-premise infrastructure was not able to scale and flex sufficiently with large-scale, fast changes in demand and the SITS Client was not as responsive for the newly home-based workforce as it was on campus.
They needed a more connected, agile, resilient, and secure platform that was able to scale and flex for the planned and unplanned. With previous success in migrating and managing student information systems in the cloud, Tribal was uniquely positioned to help KCL address these challenges.
KCL Chief Information Officer, Nick Leake said:
It has improved performance, it has provided us with resilience, it has improved some of our interfaces, and it has demonstrated that a committed group of people working well together can deliver a major project on one of our most critical systems in a record time. This project has also provided a major step forward for us to make further improvements to our student related processes.
We loaded the UCAS data into SITS within 23 minutes – something that previously took hours to complete.”
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By moving SITS to the cloud and managing it as a service, Tribal own responsibility for the system availability, performance, maintenance, and upgrades meaning KCL staff can focus on deriving increased value from the application.
Simple upgrades and guaranteed high levels of system availability and remote working experience means everything is more quickly and easily accessible. It also gives KCL the benefit of the system expanding and developing to fit their needs.
Resilience and redundancy are built-in, so that even if servers fail, automatic recovery means end users are rarely affected. There is 24/7 support and 99.9% service availability for non-scheduled outages.
KCL experienced a very smooth migration over the course of 6-months. A tremendous Tribal and KCL combined delivery team has enabled easier and faster end-users access and improved SITS performance.
KCL Director of Education and Student Solutions, John Harris said:
A massive thank you to everybody involved in making the SITS migration happen – it's a huge improvement in terms of speed, and it's going to make life much easier. As we head into September, their lives will be hugely benefited by not having to wait for the system to respond."
Given the complexity of the migration and the number of different parties involved, this is a phenomenal achievement and a testament to excellent collaboration and project work across faculties, SED, IT, Tribal and Tribal's suppliers."
Phase two, which has been started, will see the optimisation of all remaining system interfaces and further transformation and functional improvements.
With SITS running in the cloud KCL will be able to take advantage of the latest technology in the new modules rolled out on the Edge platform as all their system interfaces will be optimised to connect to Edge.
About King's College London
Founded in 1829, KCL is a public research university ranked in the top 10 UK universities globally (QS World Rankings 2021). Over 33,000 students from 150 countries study at five campuses across London. KCL is an internationally renowned university that delivers exceptional education and world-leading research. It is dedicated to driving positive and sustainable change in society and making the world a better place.
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