AWS Public Sector Blog

Seattle University’s 8-year cloud journey: Key lessons, wins, and a new path forward

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Founded in 1891, Seattle University is one of 28 Jesuit universities in the US. Located in the heart of Seattle, Washington, steps away from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) headquarters, Seattle University has long focused on innovation and excellence in education. That’s why, when a critical application was reaching end of life in 2016, the university saw an opportunity to completely transform its IT landscape. Working closely with AWS, Seattle University has now migrated more than 50 percent of its applications to the AWS Cloud and is actively migrating the remaining 50 percent.

Learn how this mid-sized university empowered a lean IT team with budget constraints to embrace an all-in cloud journey that has paid dividends with seamless disaster recovery, cost-savings, and has reinvested IT resources into student success.

Making the leap into the cloud with AWS

When Seattle University’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system reached end of life in 2016, university leadership faced a decision: reinvest in more on-premises infrastructure or take a leap forward into the cloud? Faced with the same budget constraints and limited staff resources that have affected the entire higher education industry, the university knew it couldn’t build industry-leading security, reliability, scalability, and more capabilities in-house. “We didn’t see this step as just ‘building infrastructure,’” says Travis Nation, chief information officer at SU. “We realized what we needed to do is focus on the student experience and let an outside provider do what they’re really great at. This freed up our staff to focus on things only we can do.”

Once the university embarked on this modernization journey, they conducted an evaluation of the cloud provider candidates. AWS quickly emerged as the best fit for their needs. “AWS services were understandable, the pricing structure was clear and concise, and they were a real innovator in the marketplace,” says Nation. Early on, the AWS team even suggested ways that the university could save costs on AWS—something that set them apart as a vendor. “That was a real reinforcement to us that AWS sees us as a partner, and we look at them as a partner,” adds Nation. “I truly believe that AWS is invested in our organization and making sure we’re successful.”

Supporting continuity in the cloud during crisis

Working closely with AWS, Seattle University was connected with Ellucian, an AWS Partner, to support their ERP migration. Right away, the benefit of moving to the cloud became clear. Shortly after migrating its ERP and student information system to AWS, the university faced a debilitating on-campus outage due to a failure in its on-premises storage system. But, given their move to the cloud, Seattle University’s most essential services remained fully operational. Nation recalls, “Our entire storage system crashed … but our ERP and student information system kept running. People got paid, finances were still working, and students could access what they needed.”

This incident served as a powerful proof point. As the university’s most critical systems stayed live in the cloud while many on-premises systems went dark, previous cloud skeptics became believers almost overnight. “That bought buy-in not only with my team but also with the organization holistically,” says Nation. “It solidified the mission for people external to IT.” This validated Seattle University’s move to the cloud and set a course to eventually go all-in on AWS. 

Learning from Seattle University’s cloud migration journey

As Seattle University progressed further into its migration journey, it used and developed best practices that can serve as a roadmap for other higher education institutions embarking on a similar effort.

  1. Establish a Cloud Center of Excellence – Early on, leadership realized the importance of building a dedicated team to support and evangelize cloud adoption. The team created a Cloud Center of Excellence to bring together individuals within the university’s IT landscape and beyond who were eager to explore the cloud as an avenue for growth and stability. This core team of cloud champions helped drive conversation and build excitement across the university.
  2. Cultivate the “cloud mindset shift” – Moving to the cloud isn’t just about moving applications from one place to another—it requires a shift in how teams think and operate. “When you have a test instance sitting in your data center, you don’t really think about turning it off when it’s not needed,” Nation says. “But when you transition to the cloud, you need to think about adapting your process to the cloud mindset.” And this mindset shift comes easier to some than others. AWS provided extensive training to the Seattle University team to hone their cloud skills and nurture that “cloud mindset shift” so they were prepared to take full advantage of the cloud.
  3. Prioritize workloads effectively to power the flywheel of momentum – Along their migration journey, the IT team had to prioritize which workloads to move and when to keep their cloud momentum moving. They focused on workloads nearing end of life in their on-premises hardware or workloads that could offer quick wins. “We tried to take things that we could move easily,” Nation explains. “We looked for things that would be beneficial to the institution and be reasonable.” When the team moved workloads over and pulled on-premises servers out of service, immediately saving thousands of dollars, Nation shares that with the whole team. Continuous quick wins kept the flywheel of change, impact, and motivation spinning.
  4. Set (realistic) deadlines for workload migration – Undergoing a cloud migration while keeping up with day-to-day operations can be challenging. “What we found is people would be really energized when having those [cloud] conversations, but then they’d go back and have to ‘get things done’ and would revert to their old way of thinking,” Nation says. Leadership found it essential to set clear deadlines for specific workloads. By breaking down the migration into manageable phases with set deadlines, teams stayed focused, even while juggling their regular work.
  5. Consider vendor relationships and capabilities – Cloud migration doesn’t just impact the moving applications; it can also affect the vendors behind some core capabilities. When the university initially started its migration journey, some vendors were hesitant. For some, their systems didn’t run in the cloud, so Nation’s team had to work things through with them. Navigating these hiccups required clear communication and sometimes renegotiating terms with vendors.
  6. Work with a trusted cloud service provider – Throughout their migration journey, having a trusted provider like AWS made all the difference. Just having a single point of contact reduced a significant amount of friction. “Knowing who to reach out to no matter what the issue is simplified everything,” Nation says. Seattle University’s dedicated AWS team helped navigate the complexities of their migration, offered training, and suggested how to design more efficiently in the cloud to save costs.

Transforming operations to bring more value to students

Since moving more than half of its workloads to the AWS Cloud, Seattle University has experienced significant benefits, particularly in its availability and reliability. “Before we started this journey, we had an outage every week of something; our virtual desktop environment [would go down], some server would go offline. It was constant,” Nation notes. “Now, it’s just a foregone conclusion that things are going to work, which allows my team to think about better services, not just keeping those services running.”

Plus, by moving away from on-premises infrastructure and using AWS scalable services, the university has saved significant capital expenditures. This money gets reinvested into resources that more directly benefit students. Nation explains, “By offsetting a tremendous amount of capital expenditures, that’s money that we’ve been able to put into other resources, whether that be things that help with student success, additional advising, additional counseling services, etc.”

And this reinvestment is paying off. In the 2025 U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” rankings, Seattle University rocketed up 45 spots in the social mobility rankings from last year. As the university offsets tremendous IT costs, they’ve been able to accept more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We’re talking about changing someone’s socioeconomic status. That can truly change someone’s life,” Nation says. “For that, I’d like to thank AWS for being a great partner and continuing to drive costs down.”

Looking ahead to a future in the cloud

Seattle University’s cloud transformation has brought them the flexibility, reliability, and agility to meet future challenges. For other university and college leaders considering a move to the cloud, Nation offers some advice: “We’re not a special unicorn. We didn’t start with amazing ‘cloud people.’ We’ve done this by putting one foot in front of the other.” By working closely with AWS, finding quick wins, iterating from setbacks, and improving over time, Seattle University snowballed into modernization success.

And the journey isn’t over or walked alone. “Part of what’s next in our cloud journey is what’s next in [the journey of] AWS. AWS is continually innovating with new services that would be advantageous for us. Part of our journey is tied to theirs.”

Colleges and universities worldwide are digitally transforming with cost-effective, scalable, secure and flexible AWS Cloud infrastructure. Find out how to get started at AWS Cloud for Higher Education.

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Nate Weber

Nate Weber

Nate is an account manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), specializing in higher education. Passionate about driving innovation, Nate helps institutions leverage the AWS Cloud to enhance student success, research, and operational efficiency. With a focus on collaboration, he empowers educators to achieve success in their digital transformation journey.

Travis Nation

Travis Nation

Travis Nation serves as the Vice President for Information Technology at Seattle University, where he drives initiatives that support academic and operational success. With a focus on strategic leadership, innovation, and digital transformation, Travis works to modernize technology infrastructure and enhance experiences for students, faculty, staff, and the community.