College of the Marshall Islands migrates to MySQL Database Service in Oracle Cloud to improve application performance, stability, and security.
Business Challenges
Established in 1989, College of the Marshall Islands (CMI) is a community college offering certificate, associate, and bachelor's degrees to the residents of the Marshall Islands, a sprawling chain of islands in the central Pacific Ocean.
The college was using MySQL on-premises for its various applications - a support ticketing system called Helpdesk, an attendance monitoring and notification tool called EarlyAlert, and a survey tool to get feedback from alumni called AlumniTracer. These applications are used by the staff, students, and the community.
Manually managing backups of its databases was always a challenge for the college. In addition, frequent power outages on the island meant that the batteries were running out before the generators kicked in, leading to disaster recovery and risk management issues, which the college needed to fix. That's when CMI considered moving its applications and MySQL database to the cloud.
Why CMI Chose MySQL?
The college considered AWS and Microsoft Azure before finally choosing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because of OCI's ease of use and low cost.
College of the Marshall Islands found spinning up compute instances from images allowed employees to migrate applications faster than creating them from scratch, then installing all the necessary modules and extensions.
In addition, the ability to securely deploy the applications on a private network, coupled with automated backups, was yet another reason to choose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Results
The migration from the on-premises systems to OCI and MySQL Database Service was smooth and quick. The applications' performance and stability significantly increased. Initial load times for some applications dropped from two minutes to just a few seconds.
Administrative costs have dropped by 20% because most manual operations (OS patching, database backup, and security checks) are now automated.
Moving to automated database backups from manual backup scripts has reduced the risk of data loss. This has also eliminated system integrity issues associated with a manual process.
Deploying the instances and the MySQL database on a private network also improved the school's security posture.
In case of a power outage, employees no longer have to worry about data loss or corruption.