Humber College fast-tracks virtualization for remote students

How we helped

Conscious of the impact any downtime in academic resource access would have on the students, Humber College fast-tracked all internal processes so that Rackspace could resource the project in one day, which eliminated weeks of lag time. Along with five representatives from Humber College, Rackspace brought in a dedicated technical team to implement the project. Together, they delivered a remote connection to students in 10 days, allowing the students to get back to learning quickly.

The original goal of Humber College’s digital education strategy was to give its students remote access to all of its academic applications. This would give them the flexibility to access course resources on any device when they were away from the physical campus. It would also help students overcome the limitations of the college’s current systems, which only provided access to academic applications on its 2,450 on-premises Windows workstations that were located in dedicated on-campus locations.

As the largest college in Toronto, Humber offers a broad range of advanced academic credentials, and provides the latest technology and teaching methodologies in state-of-the-art labs and learning spaces designed to emulate real-world environments and experiences. Driven to transform the future of post-secondary education, Humber College decided to invest in digital infrastructure to foster innovation and collaboration among its community and enable the best possible future for its students.

Also, the campus wanted to optimize its resource investment and reduce the number and size of its computer labs by enabling a Bring Your Own Device model, whereby students could access academic resources from anywhere using their own devices.

As part of its strategic digitization goals, Humber College has been in communication with Rackspace regarding AWS capabilities. The campus had requested a PoC to determine how the platform would work and to gain confidence using cloud technologies. When its three campuses were abruptly shut down by public health authorities following governmental social distancing directives, Humber College rapidly accelerated its first digitization initiative — deploying AWS.

Along with discussions to implement virtualization, Humber College was also working with Rackspace on a student and financial information system cloud migration project. Humber College immediately sought its partner’s AWS expertise and requested a rapid route to an effective remote-access solution. Conscious of the impact any downtime in academic resource access would have on students, Humber College fast-tracked all internal processes.

Rackspace developed a clear path forward that used an AWS business continuity solution — Amazon AppStream 2.0. AppStream was selected to deploy Windows-based applications on AWS, because it provides per-application deployment, which simplifies application distribution. Rackspace designed, tested and implemented a production-grade AppStream environment integrated with the campus’s on-premises data center.

Rackspace also employed several AWS services to deploy the solution, which includes a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) maintained across two availability zones. Amazon Route 53 is used for domain name system (DNS) resolution. AWS Network Address Translation (NAT) gateways give the private subnets internet access through the internet gateway (IGW). An AWS application load balancer (ALB) handles internal applications deployed to AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.

In addition, the solution uses an Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for file sharing, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for other storage. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides user and role authentication, authorization and management. Humber College’s on-premises VPN terminates in the AWS Transit Gateway (TGW). An AWS Lambda function switches the AppStream fleets between day and night modes, which reduces costs during low-use hours.