Nairobi — Strathmore University has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to revamp its remote learning programme worldwide.

The move to cloud means that the university no longer has to worry about maintaining hardware and can scale its e-learning with ease.

"In the last year, online education has become a major focus for us. Like everyone else, our digital transformation journey has been accelerated by the pandemic," said Stephen Momanyi, Director of ICT Services at Strathmore University.

Momanyi noted that with the demand for remote learning, the university saw the need to scale to serve its students better.

"We have been ready for this evolution for quite some time, it just took the right cloud partner to guide us on this journey," said Momanyi.

With a campus of 8000 students and 1500 staff who now require a 24/7 education experience, Strathmore University needed an IT infrastructure that was flexible and scalable.

The on-premise hardware running the learning engine was ageing and unable to keep up with the demand, and system uptime became a real concern.

"The pandemic dramatically set back learning more so in Sub-Saharan Africa, where technology uptake in learning institutions has been slow. We are very happy to see that our services have not only enabled Strathmore to transition to online learning but also scale their services beyond the Kenyan borders," said Robin Njiru, Regional Lead, West, East & Central Africa, Amazon Web Services added

The onset of cloud technology has transformed the capabilities of every industry.

After the world was significantly disrupted by an unforeseen pandemic, this transformation was keenly felt in education, where long-term disruption could have had a negative impact on an entire generation of students.