For hundreds of schools, over 300 separate cloud environments were required for development, testing, and production, which meant significant computing power, storage, and memory requirements regardless of the school’s size. This significantly increased cloud expenses, with monthly Azure bills fluctuating wildly from one cycle to the next. Operational inefficiencies made maintenance and updates resource-intensive, making it difficult to rollout and scale up even with small size schools.

• High Costs. $100,000+ monthly, unpredictable cloud expenses.
• Inefficiency. Several hundred environments, resource-heavy maintenance.
• Redundancy. Over-provisioning and inefficient resource utilization.
• Scalability Issues. The previous architecture was not scalable.

Our team carried out a thorough and detailed architectural review to map the inefficiencies and constraints with the current design. Buchanan introduced a scalable model which would leverage Oracle’s Pluggable Database (PDB) model to reinvent their application infrastructure. So, instead of maintaining separate virtual infrastructures for each school, the platform can now integrate many school databases into a streamlined system. The scale-up ability of the new architecture facilitates a smooth deployment and ramp-up of new schools.

The significant benefit of the new design resulting in the consolidation of over 300 isolated environments to only 10 highly efficient servers, leading to reduced infrastructure constraints. Leveraging in-memory processing and data handling as part of the new design improved runtime operations and improved application performance.

• Reduced Infrastructure. 300+ environments −› 10 servers.
• Lower Cloud Costs. Shared resources = significant savings.
• Improved Performance. Faster, more efficient operations.
• Scalable Growth. Adding new schools without having to add infrastructure.

The key takeaway from this case is that for any company operating in the cloud without the right architecture, costs can spiral out of control. Strategic optimization is critical as more businesses shift from traditional data centers to cloud environments and metered services. By rethinking its infrastructure, the customer didn’t just reduce costs, it also created a scalable, future-ready foundation that enables innovation and long-term success.