Modernising LAUTECH's Digital Services: Improving Reliability, Resilience, and Campus Operations

About the Company

Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) operates a broad range of digital services supporting students, staff, administrators, and campus operations. These services include student-facing portals, facility booking systems, facility management applications, financial and operational systems, and internal collaboration platforms.

As the university's reliance on digital services increased, particularly during registration, examinations, admissions, and major campus activities, the limitations of its existing technology environment became increasingly apparent.

Customer Challenge

LAUTECH's core digital applications were built on older .NET architectures that were not designed to accommodate the increasing scale and demands of the institution. During peak periods, applications could experience performance challenges and service interruptions at precisely the times when students and staff depended on them most.

Application deployments were also infrequent and disruptive. Updates and fixes often had to be carefully scheduled around operational periods to minimise the impact on users. This slowed the institution's ability to introduce improvements and respond quickly to operational requirements.

The university's SQL Server databases supported critical workloads including facility bookings, user accounts, access credentials, financial transactions, and operational records. However, the environment lacked automated failover and consistently tested recovery processes. A major database failure could therefore affect multiple campus services simultaneously.

LAUTECH's productivity environment was similarly fragmented across Microsoft 365 and QuickSuite. Teams across facilities management, student services, finance, IT, and communications relied on disconnected workflows, manual follow-ups, and email-based approvals. This reduced visibility and made it difficult to consistently track and audit operational activities.

Partner's Solution

Digitspot designed a cloud and productivity modernisation programme focused on improving the reliability of LAUTECH's digital services while strengthening database resilience and automating key university workflows.

The university's legacy .NET applications were modernised to supported runtimes and containerised on AWS-managed infrastructure. The new architecture provided a stronger foundation for application scalability and enabled the university to respond more effectively to periods of increased demand.

Automated CI/CD pipelines were introduced to improve the consistency and speed of application releases. Horizontal auto-scaling was implemented to support high-demand periods such as student registration and examinations, while centralised monitoring, logging, and alerting provided greater visibility into application performance and operational health.

Production SQL Server databases were migrated to Amazon RDS for SQL Server. Multi-AZ high availability, automated backups, point-in-time recovery, encryption at rest, and disaster recovery testing were introduced to strengthen the resilience of critical university workloads.

Digitspot also introduced SharePoint Online as a central platform for institutional documentation and knowledge management, while Microsoft Teams was standardised for communication across operational departments. Secure integration services were implemented to connect Microsoft 365 and QuickSuite workflows, while automated processes were introduced for maintenance requests, room allocation approvals, visitor access, event coordination, student service requests, and internal approvals.

Results and Benefits

• Student and campus applications targeted for 99.9% availability
• Application response times targeted for a 40% improvement
• Deployment time targeted for reduction to less than one hour
• Release frequency targeted to increase by at least 75%
• Deployment-related service disruptions targeted for a 90% reduction
• Database availability targeted at 99.95%
• Critical service interruptions caused by database failures targeted for a 90% reduction
• Recovery objectives targeted at less than 30 minutes RTO and less than five minutes RPO
• Sensitive data targeted for 100% encryption at rest
• Microsoft Teams adoption targeted at 95% of administrative and operational staff
• Manual processing of operational requests targeted for a 60% reduction
• Approval cycle times targeted for a 50% reduction
• At least 80% of high-volume business processes targeted for automation
• Centralised digital tracking and auditing introduced across operational approvals and workflows

About the Partner

Digitspot, established in 2011, continues to pursue its vision of helping both small and large-scale companies leverage cloud solutions to drive growth and innovation. As an AWS Advanced Partner, Digitspot remains committed to delivering world-class cloud strategies and implementations.