University of Alaska Banner Cloud Migration

Dec. 3, 2021

The University of Alaska Office of Information Technology has embarked on a project that will advance the Banner enterprise resource planning ecosystem and enable increased agility and stability. This is the first in a series of articles to report on the goals and progress of this initiative.

In late Summer of 2021, University of Alaska began the Banner Cloud Migration project. The goal of the Cloud Migration project is to move the Banner application and associated Ellucian products to the Ellucian Cloud hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) by October 2022. The benefit of this migration is not only to enable UA to take advantage of the Ellucian expertise in managing the applications, but also to move the responsibility of maintenance and overall stability of the environments into Ellucian’s hands. In addition, moving the critical systems to the Ellucian Cloud, will ensure the systems are on the latest infrastructure offered by AWS. 

During the initial months, OIT met with Ellucian to plan out the new Cloud environment. Ellucian has spent the last several months building out servers and installing applications. The new environment was recently turned over to the team in OIT to perform testing on the Core components. That process has been going very well, and the OIT team is due to begin applying customizations and working through the list of integrations. 

UA functional users have been working on test plans and are eager to log in to the new environment and begin testing. Functional testing is expected to begin within the next week or two. Functional testing is broken into 3 phases. The first phase (Dec. thru Feb.) involves high-level testing of logins, basic functionality, and a few customizations and integrations. The second phase (Feb. thru Jun.), referred to as “swim lane” testing, consists of thorough testing of each team’s domain and more integrations and customizations. The third phase (Jun. thru Sept.), referred to as “community” testing, involves full cycle testing where processes will be tested from start to finish, across all domains, all applications, all customizations and all integrations.

Look forward to more articles on the Banner Cloud Migration project. If you have feedback and are interested in learning more about the project and monitoring its progress, contact Chris Strube to subscribe to the weekly newsletter.