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mental impact than the typical for-profit school.)
Phase two consisted of moving those local IT operations to the Laureate data centers for hosting. A lot of the initial cloud implementa- tion took place during this second phase.
In early 2019, Laureate sold USAHS to St. Augustine Acquisition Corp., affiliated with Altas Partners, a Canadian investment firm. That launched phase three, when the IT orga- nization had an eight-month period in which to migrate and transform its systems back to being “solely owned and operated and admin- istered by the university.” Moline and his unit made the case for shifting additional opera- tions to the cloud.
The goal in each decision was to choose solutions that would ensure resiliency. For Moline that meant several things:
• Shifting to an all-laptop model, to allow peo-
ple to be able to “physically just pick up their
systems and go”;
• Architecting the infrastructure so that
nobody would have to “physically touch the
equipment to keep it running”; and
• Making sure applications and data were “hosted not just in one place but in multiple places, so that if something happened to one location, it continued to operate in
other locations.”
As a result, IT chose cloud configurations for IT needs wherever possible. For example, the institution replaced its phone system with RingCentral, which could enable communica- tions on people’s laptops and included a private-label version of Zoom, with meeting functionality.
When coronavirus struck U.S. shores in early 2020, changing behaviors practically overnight, the university had about five days in which to make the shift to a fully online environment, like nearly every campus. “That
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