Universitas Prasetiya Mulya is a leading business school in Indonesia established in 1982 by the country’s prominent business leaders. It was the first business school in Indonesia to offer a Master in Administration (MBA) program to serve business entrepreneurs, professionals, and researchers as an excellent learning center. Local and international experts and professors hailing from well-reputed overseas institutions such as Arizona State University, Lowell University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Texas A&M University, USA, helped launch the first MBA program. In early 2016, Universitas Prasetiya Mulya was transformed into a university of the future and became a dual and collaborative university in Indonesia. Currently, the institution offers four MM programs individually designed and targeted at different goals. Additionally, the university offers a leading program that emphasizes learning by implementing business concepts in real-world situations.

Universitas Prasetiya Mulya used to run Moodle and SAP with on-premises servers. Its IT team faced significant challenges with increasing number of online students during the unprecedented COVID crisis. Therefore, it was looking for a reliable cloud service provider that could help them solve the following key challenges:

●Develop a Scalable IT Infrastructure: Developing an auto-scalable technology infrastructure that manages increasing demands, accommodate larger workloads, and supports the existing learning platform and the SAP core system was a primary challenge.
●Manage Concurrent User Traffic: Handling a maximum of 6,000 concurrent users accessing the apps was a challenging goal. Load balancing was crucial for achieving the optimal performance of the applications to offer a seamless learning experience.
●Effective Capacity Planning: Migration of on-premises data center operations to cloud infrastructure required effective capacity planning through a reliable cloud service provider.
●Cost-effective Solution: Finding a secure, highly-scalable, and cost-effective solution compared to an on-premises solution was one of the major requirements.

Universitas Prasetiya Mulya leveraged Alibaba Cloud solutions to develop scalable, secure, and reliable cloud infrastructure. Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Compute Service (ECS) helped in achieving seamless scalability faster with low latency. Our auto-scaling capability helped in optimizing the infrastructure capacity based on real-time demands. Prasetiya Mulya utilized Server Load Balancer (SLB) to respond to sudden traffic spikes, distribute traffic among multiple instances, and prevent a single point of failure (SPOFs) while providing services through various applications. Furthermore, highly scalable and automated Alibaba Cloud solutions such as ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL and ApsaraDB for Redis were employed to process high concurrent requests and improve the performance of cloud-hosted applications. Alibaba Cloud’s Object Storage Service (OSS) and Elastic IP helped in handling massive data and scaling the infrastructure capacity and processing capability. With Alibaba Cloud’s stringent IDC standards, server access standards, O&M standards, and a host of international information security certifications, Universitas Prasetiya Mulya were able to adhere to several compliance requirements and security regulations.

Due to the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing seamless services was challenging for Universitas Prasetiya Mulya. The collaboration with Alibaba Cloud turned out to be successful and helped them overcome the bottlenecks. Alibaba Cloud’s proven technology stack supported Universitas Prasetiya Mulya’s blended learning strategy by helping them to smoothly run web and mobile apps with massive and volatile traffic. Also, Prasetiya Mulya looks forward to utilizing Alibaba Cloud's Big Data solutions for the repository and digital library systems to provide uninterrupted online access to published documents.