Johannesburg, 04 Mar 2022
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud enables EdTech companies to accelerate their development of scalable and secure technology, with key tools and ecosystems designed to enable them.
This is according to speakers addressing a webinar hosted by First Distribution, in collaboration with MFT, AWS and ITWeb last week.
Thandi Majola, account manager for Edtechs & Publishers at AWS, said there were increasing opportunities for edtechs and educational publishers as educational institutions moved to digital teaching and learning. The AWS Cloud gives these edtechs flexibility and scale, and can also allow them to access global markets, she said.
Majola highlighted the AWS free tier, where organisations can explore over 100 products and start building, as well as the AWS Partner Network (APN), a global community of partners that leverages programs, expertise, and resources to build, market, and sell customer offerings.
The benefits of the cloud include an increase in speed and agility, the ability to scale up and down, and the potential to go global in minutes, she said.
“In education, there are seasonal peaks in consumption of IT resources, such as exam times and registration periods, and with the cloud they can scale up accordingly. During troughs, they can reduce consumption at a click of a button,” Majola said.
Highlighting key trends in the sector, she said: “In education, we are seeing more industry consolidation, with mergers and acquisitions. There is also a move toward lifelong learning and more personalised learning using new technology such as big data, analytics, AI and machine learning. Another trend is ‘Hollywood meets Harvard’ in which we see gamification and celebrities partnering with learning organisations to make learning more fun.”
Education and public sector organisations were also often price sensitive and concerned about skills and data sovereignty, she noted. “Our data centre in Cape Town services that data sovereignty requirement. It’s a new world in terms of the public cloud, so many will say the messaging is exciting, but they don’t have the internal skills to make the move. We don’t leave you in the lurch. Through our ecosystem of industry specialists, there is enablement and knowledge transfer through training and certification, to capacitate internal staff members to build on and run that platform. AWS has a robust, fully featured technology infrastructure solution to address virtually any use case organisations have – including storage, compute power, networking and IoT,” she said.
Avin Mansookram, director at MFT – a technology solutions provider and partner of AWS, said there were three ways to acquire AWS resources and move to the cloud: “You can either build a new team from scratch, buy a new team with AWS capability, or partner with a firm like ours and immediately have a lot of benefits.”
“Building a team takes time. You need to find the skills, which are still scarce and costly, and this process takes time. Buying a team presents even more challenges. By far the easiest way is to partner with a firm to immediately gain access to a team of people at a price point that is acceptable,” he said. “The benefits of partnering are that you gain immediate access to AWS designations and competencies. We offer a high touch service, we scale with you, we have customer credentials, and we can be your conduit to other AWS services and resources such as proof of concept credits, solution architecture support, and training and skills development.”
Mansookram said MFT often recommended starting small with a project proving the value of cloud.
“The journey is quite hyperbolic because once you’re comfortable you can move more foundational technology, start to retire older technology and move the organization to become a cloud native organization. In any migration there is a migration cost upfront, but over time you reach a point where your TCO is lower than if you had done nothing in the first place,” he said. “However, a lot of the benefit of AWS comes from continually optimising the depth of AWS services to serve the customer better.”
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