Procurement to Impact: AWS for Education

One ubiquitous feature of life in a modern public education institution is the constant sense of having to do more with less. Behind the tiled corridors and blinking server racks lies an unrelenting pressure: to modernise, streamline, and support ever-expanding digital demands on finite resources. Tight budgets, legacy infrastructure, and shifting expectations from students and researchers converge into a kind of operational static—persistent, low-level, and impossible to ignore.

The cloud offers a chance to clear that interference. But adopting it isn’t a flick of a switch—it’s a measured progression, from procurement decisions to visible institutional outcomes.

This article is designed for IT leaders in public education. Whether you’re running services for a national university, a technical college, or a collaborative research environment, we outline the key stages of cloud adoption on AWS—and the practical realities that come with it.

1. Procurement: Navigating the Maze

The first hurdle is often the hardest to find your way through. Public sector procurement isn’t just about choosing the right service—it’s about aligning to policy, frameworks, and financial controls. The process can feel bureaucratic and opaque, with multiple stakeholders pulling in different directions.

Key challenges:

• Navigating compliance frameworks (e.g. GDPR, national procurement laws)
• Budget uncertainty and annual cycles
• Perception of lock-in and lack of cloud fluency among finance teams

Frameworks like OCRE provide compliant access routes to AWS for many European institutions, offering a way to simplify procurement while meeting public sector regulations. Flexible pricing models allow cost forecasting and scaling to fit academic cycles, and AWS notes that many universities are shifting from capital to operational expenditure to improve agility and better align IT with evolving institutional priorities.

To make the most of these opportunities, it's worth beginning with internal alignment. Engaging finance, legal, and academic stakeholders early can smooth the process and help build a narrative around long-term value, not just upfront cost. These conversations lay the groundwork for informed decisions later on, ensuring that technical choices align with institutional priorities and that budgeting reflects both short-term needs and strategic intent.

2. Onboarding: Building a Secure, Scalable Foundation

Once procurement is secured, the onboarding phase lays the technical and governance groundwork for everything that follows. This is where short-term decisions shape long-term flexibility—and where early missteps can create lasting complexity.

Key priorities and common sticking points

A successful on-boarding phase also involves more than just technical setup—it’s about putting the right structures in place to ensure growth is secure, sustainable, and scalable. The following elements are especially important to get right from the outset:

• Identity and access management (e.g. AWS IAM)
• Account structure via AWS Organizations
• Landing zones for scalable, secure growth (AWS Control Tower)

And then, even with strong foundations in place, many institutions can quite naturally encounter recurring hurdles during onboarding—some of the most common include:

• Disconnected departments using siloed infrastructure
• Lack of cloud fluency among sysadmins
• Tension between security and flexibility

This is why early investments in automation and standardised landing zones often save institutions significant time and effort later in their cloud journey. Indeed, we’ve found that many companies benefit from beginning with a Well-Architected Review or small-scale pilot to validate governance and architecture choices before scaling.

The right support at this stage is also essential, particularly when designing secure landing zones and IAM policies that balance flexibility with compliance. Systems should be robust, auditable, and scalable—capable of supporting the diverse access needs common in academic institutions. This balance between flexibility and compliance is especially important in education environments, where access control must accommodate students, faculty, researchers, and external collaborators without compromising on security.

For more on how we approach cloud-native security design, see How to Secure Serverless Applications on AWS and Securing APIs in an AWS Cloud Environment.

3. Implementation: From Legacy to Living Systems

This is the most visible phase of the journey—where services migrate, students and researchers interact with cloud-powered tools, and digital transformation becomes tangible. It’s also where user expectations meet reality. Implementation is most effective when it follows clear, repeatable patterns—such as reference architectures and staged blueprints—that help teams move from proof of concept to production. These approaches reduce uncertainty, speed up delivery, and create consistency across varied use cases.

Typical projects

The range of implementation projects is broad, often shaped by the specific needs of departments, students, and researchers. The full scope is almost limitless, but some of the most common include:

• Migrating LMS platforms like Moodle
• Deploying virtual research environments
• Modernising student-facing portals and APIs

For a broader perspective on how AWS supports a range of academic goals—from storage to AI-powered research—you might find our article “From Storage to AI: 5 Cloud Use Cases for Academia” worth exploring.

Technical benefits

Whatever the focus—whether improving research capacity, enhancing student services, or modernising core systems—successful implementation depends on a consistent set of technical capabilities. These cloud-native building blocks make it easier to scale quickly, adapt systems over time, and automate routine processes, including:

1. Elastic infrastructure via Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3
2. Serverless flexibility with AWS Lambda
3. Event-driven automation via Amazon EventBridge

These solutions—ranging from legacy platform modernisation to student-facing service improvements—also reflect broader trends in cloud adoption across the education sector. According to AWS public sector guidance, the cloud enables institutions to launch services faster and scale without over-provisioning. It also allows IT teams to shift their focus from infrastructure maintenance to innovation, a transition that many universities now see as central to their digital transformation efforts.

A good example of the kind of applied innovation that you can realistically aspire to can be seen at EKT, Greece's National Documentation Centre, where there was a need to unlock and structure a vast corpus of scientific literature. Here we helped EKT implement a system using AWS services to extract, classify, and connect content from thousands of academic PDFs—transforming static documents into a searchable, contextualised knowledge graph for the national academic ecosystem. This approach significantly improved access to research and enhanced the ability of institutions to discover and connect relevant scientific work.

4. Optimisation: Managing Cost and Complexity

Once core services are live, the focus shifts to optimisation—ensuring that cloud infrastructure continues to deliver value over time. This stage involves refining usage, improving cost visibility, and strengthening operational guardrails. It's also the point where cloud decisions begin to intersect more directly with financial oversight and institutional accountability, prompting new conversations between IT, finance, and governance teams.

Ongoing practices:

1. Cost monitoring with AWS Cost Explorer
2. Performance tuning via AWS Compute Optimizer
3. Regular security reviews and patching

While the tools for monitoring and optimisation are readily available, the real challenge lies in sustaining visibility and accountability as cloud environments evolve. Cost and performance oversight can become harder to manage over time, especially as cloud usage diversifies across departments and teams. Typical challenges include:

1. Identifying idle or underutilised resources
2. Keeping security baselines up to date
3. Getting granular enough cost data to satisfy finance

AWS regularly emphasises that cost optimisation is a continuous process, not a one-time event. For educational institutions, where transparency and accountability are vital, this mindset encourages a more sustainable approach to managing cloud usage.

From our experience, strategies like consistent tagging, regular rightsizing, and proactive cost monitoring can make a meaningful difference. These practices not only help control spending but also foster confidence among finance and leadership teams. We’ve also seen AI play a growing role in this space—helping identify usage patterns, flag anomalies, and support better workload planning, particularly in dynamic research environments.

5. Outcomes: Delivering Real Impact

The final stage is where success is measured: Are students better supported? Is research faster or more accessible? Are operations more resilient? This is where the promise of cloud technology must show itself in tangible results.

Metrics that matter:

1. System uptime during exam periods
2. Reduction in time-to-compute for research
3. Improved accessibility and user satisfaction

AWS has observed that institutions are increasingly viewing cloud as a strategic enabler—not merely a tool for cost savings, but a foundation for improving student services, accelerating research, and enhancing institutional resilience. As they note in their higher education overview, "cloud computing allows institutions to innovate faster, scale efficiently, and better serve students and researchers."

Indeed, in our work with higher education clients, we've seen how cloud adoption enables not only faster delivery of services but also more responsive, student-focused innovation. For example, cloud-native platforms make it possible to launch adaptive learning tools or support real-time collaboration in research environments—initiatives that would be prohibitively complex or slow to implement on traditional infrastructure.

Cloud Migration: A Journey Worth Planning

Cloud adoption in education isn’t a checkbox exercise. It’s a strategic journey that, if approached thoughtfully, can unlock agility, innovation, and resilience. From rethinking procurement processes to fine-tuning cost management and delivering measurable outcomes, each stage presents both challenges and opportunities. What matters most is the ability to align technology choices with long-term institutional goals—and to keep adapting as those goals evolve.