Case Study - IIM Nagpur

IIM Nagpur legacy environment was not aligned with modern cloud best practices. The infrastructure lacked proper segmentation, automated scaling, and cost optimization measures, which posed significant risks across security, availability, and operational efficiency.

Frequent Downtime & Slow Release Cycles (CI/CD):

Manual deployments caused repeated outages and delayed releases. Without automation, the business risked prolonged downtime, missed go-to-market opportunities, and reduced customer satisfaction. By implementing AWS CodePipeline, deployments were fully automated—using EC2 for development workloads and Amazon ECS Fargate for production—significantly improving release speed, stability, and agility.

Scalability & Availability Risks (Auto Scaling)

Applications were hosted on fixed EC2 instances with no elasticity. During peak loads, the environment risked downtime, poor user experience, and revenue loss; during low traffic, resources were underutilized, leading to unnecessary costs. Auto Scaling groups were implemented, ensuring 93-95% uptime and seamless capacity adjustments based on traffic patterns.

Security Gaps & Compliance Risks (Public Servers)

Workloads were hosted on publicly accessible servers with open ports, GuardDuty, and proper network segmentation. Without remediation, IIM Nagpur faced.

IIM Nagpur aimed to modernize its infrastructure by transitioning to a secure, cost-efficient, and scalable AWS environment. The customer sought high availability for production workloads while maintaining isolated development and staging environments to enhance reliability.The ultimate goal was to establish a resilient, efficient platform that minimized operational risks and supported long-term business growth.

Solution Highlights 

The solution leverages AWS compute, networking, storage, and security services to provide a scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running applications, storing organizational data, and ensuring operational efficiency. The architecture ensures high availability, fault tolerance, and governance, as represented in the architecture diagram.

Service Selection & Justification

Amazon EC2 (Development + Production):

Used to host application workloads, batch jobs, and development environments. EC2 offers full control over OS and software stack, making it ideal for workloads requiring persistent compute. EC2 was preferred over serverless options for applications needing long-running or specialized configurations.

Amazon VPC:

Provides isolated networking for secure deployment of workloads. Public and private subnets support segmentation of development, production, and sensitive data traffic. Multi-AZ design ensures fault tolerance and business continuity.

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB):

Distributes incoming traffic across EC2 instances to ensure high availability and seamless scaling during traffic spikes. ELB prevents downtime by routing traffic only to healthy instances.

Amazon S3 (with Versioning):

Central storage repository for application assets, backups, and static content. Versioning ensures rollback in case of accidental deletions or data corruption. S3 was preferred over EFS due to cost-effectiveness and scalable storage.

AWS WAF:

Protects application endpoints from common web attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Integrated with ELB to provide application-layer security.

AWS Secrets Manager:

Securely stores credentials, API keys, and sensitive data. Eliminates hard-coded secrets in code and allows automated rotation for compliance.

Amazon CloudWatch:

Monitors metrics, logs, and application health across EC2, ELB, and other AWS services. Provides real-time observability, alerts, and operational insights.

• IIM Nagpur environment was configured to support load testing for traffic simulation and performance validation.
• The architecture supports future Auto Scaling to dynamically increase or decrease capacity based on website demand.
• AWS services were selected to maintain a balance between cost efficiency and performance.

• Enhanced Security: All workloads are now isolated in private subnets with secure VPN access, eliminating public exposure.
• High Availability: Load balancing ensures consistent performance and uptime even under heavy load.
• Scalability Ready: The new environment supports load testing and future auto-scaling for peak traffic periods.
• Operational Efficiency: Simplified management and faster deployments through AWS-native tools.
• Cost Optimization: Predictable monthly costs with optimized resource usage across compute, storage, and networking.

By migrating to AWS, IIM Nagpur successfully transitioned from a publicly hosted on-premises setup to a secure, private, and scalable cloud environment. The new architecture not only strengthens IIM Nagpur data security and reliability but also ensures seamless website performance during peak academic cycles.

This cloud transformation, delivered by i2k2 Networks, empowers IIM Nagpur to focus on its core mission of providing world-class education while maintaining operational excellence, scalability, and compliance on AWS.