Moving and Automating CMI’s Learning, Teaching, and Business Processes into Cloud Hosting Services
The College has successfully migrated over 89 percent of its teaching, learning, and business processes into cloud hosting services. The initiative started seven years ago. The other 11 percent will be completed before the end of FY2021. The objective of the Cloud Migration was to cut costs and improve efficiency wherein the systems are automated and non-value added processes were eliminated. This initiative was necessary to address the College’s major challenges as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Cloud Hosting Services enable on-premise servers to migrate to a secure online platform or location that provides technological flexible systems. Last year, the IT Department began moving most of the critical infrastructures to the cloud hosting services. The first phase of the Cloud Migration Strategy was the migration of the school Learning Management System (LMS or Moodle). Moodle is the world’s most widely used Learning Management System (LMS). The College has used Moodle since 2008 and is managed by the IT Department. Due to the threat of the global pandemic, and the possibility of working from home to provide teaching and other College-wide essential services, the CMI IT Department has decided to migrate its services to the cloud. Hosting in the cloud provides flexible modular for the student and faculty needs (i.e. Real-time service response functions, secured online learning platform, etc.) The LMS migration was completed in May 2020 and successfully launched in the Fall 2020 Semester. The College is the only institution nationwide, fully ready to continue its services, uninterrupted shall the pandemic restrictions be provoked.
The second phase of the Cloud Migration Strategy is the migration of School Information System (SIS). Due to several unexpected power outages in Majuro last year, one of our SIS servers was damaged which prompted CMI to move the College’s SIS to the cloud immediately to avoid losing some of our major data. The migration was completed without losing any single data and now the School Information System is securely hosted in the cloud since August of 2020.
The final Phase of the CMI IT Department’s Cloud Migration Strategy is to move the critical Financial Accounting System processes and data from on-site premise to cloud hosting services. The CMI IT and Business Office Department collaborated with the Abila and Microix technical team to ensure this project is successful. For the MIP cloud, the data would not be the on-premise server, it eliminates the hassles and cost of the physical infrastructure maintenance and support. The cloud hosting providers will be responsible for maintaining the backup, upgrade, and secure hardware and software upgrades. To ensure a smooth transition during the migration, the CMI IT team requested the RMI National Telecommunication Authority (NTA) to provide a dedicated 50 Mbps additional bandwidth to its existing capacity dedicated only for the MIP and Microix users during the migration phase. The migration was a success and now 100 percent of the College’s critical Financial Systems are paperless and data are stored in cloud hosting services. This means that the budget process, procurement process, payroll process, and auditing fieldworks can be done remotely away from the CMI Uliga campus. Once again CMI is the only institution nationwide, fully utilizing the benefits of modern technology.
As demonstrated, CMI, proudly continues to champion innovation by providing stable, reliable, and efficient services in this fast-moving 21st century.
