“The flexibility of the platform and the availability to understand and meet our demands are great differentials of the company that lead us to wish to fully adopt other Azion products and functionalities.”
Chrystiano Costa Mincoff, Executive Director of Operations at UniCesumar
Challenge
Qualified professors, exclusive teaching materials and a flexible teaching methodology are some of the components that place UniCesumar among the leading distance learning institutions in Brazil, according to the Ministry of Education. One of its key differentiators is the concern with providing advanced technology and building innovative solutions to deliver better experiences for students.
There is a growing demand for video largely driven by 5G. It is estimated that streaming and downloading videos will represent 82% of global Internet consumption. For UniCesumar, this creates important scalability and performance requirements for developing a robust education platform for future generations.
Another important aspect of ensuring availability for students, staff and other stakeholders in the educational ecosystem is cybersecurity. It is estimated that 60% of cyber threats target the education sector. For example, DDoS attacks increased 278% in Q1 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, and 542% compared to Q1 2018.
Considering these factors, UniCesumar evolved its technology strategy by adopting a modern solution for content delivery capable of supporting this new phase of the institution, which increasingly relies on digital innovation.
Solution
After extensive research involving several vendors, including specialists in the education market, UniCesumar partnered with Azion, providing its technology team with capabilities designed to:
- accelerate content delivery;
- simplify the development of innovations;
- facilitate the creation of secure applications; and
- enable rapid and automated scalability.
With 90% of its student base focused on distance learning, the migration to the Azion Platform was decisive for UniCesumar to accelerate its technological capabilities, offering the best possible experience to students regardless of where they are.
The development of Applications to replace traditional CDN services was completed in just a few days and involved the implementation of the following products and modules:
- Application Acceleration: used to accelerate multiple applications that integrate the EAD platform;
- Functions: to prevent leakage of specific content intended for enrolled students, UniCesumar implemented authentication and authorization features for access to systems and educational content;
- Firewall: allows the university to create advanced protection rules to expand access control in real time, contributing to the availability of the learning platform during complex security events;
- Cache: performs intelligent and manageable replication of educational content on Azion infrastructure, accelerating delivery performance and providing immediate speed gains without the need for additional provisioning.
UniCesumar added an intermediate caching layer, Azion Tiered Cache, where content is replicated and can remain available for extended periods regardless of purges or cache updates. These changes maximized the performance of high-definition video delivery for students in Brazil and abroad.
Results
UniCesumar obtained immediate gains with Applications on the Azion Platform. Being 70% faster, the new platform significantly improved the user experience for students and staff.
The increased efficiency in system development — with global scale and always-on availability — enabled the technology team to accelerate digital operations, resulting in:
- decreased infrastructure resource consumption;
- operational simplification; and
- cost reduction.
Since the migration, UniCesumar, with the support of Azion’s Security Response Team (SRT) and intelligent algorithms, has maintained 100% platform availability and mitigated cyber attacks without impacting the service.
With global infrastructure and high performance across all regions of Brazil, Azion supported UniCesumar in improving availability and scalability, ensuring reliable access to educational services for students across the country and abroad.
About UniCesumar
UniCesumar is one of the largest educational groups in Brazil and a reference in distance learning, with more than 700 centers across the country and international operations serving Brazilian students living in Miami, Dubai and Geneva.
With the mission of promoting quality education to train highly qualified professionals, UniCesumar considers continuous technological innovation one of its core values. This is reflected in the delivery of high-definition educational content with high performance for more than 250 thousand students.