SEAS

The Challenges

SEAS was using a legacy system which had several limitations that needed to be addressed.

The legacy system required multiple database instances which increased environmental expenses and was hosted in RackSpace on physical machines.
A new solution would need to be scalable in order to on-board new school districts and states rapidly.
The legacy system was unable to scale down during off-peak times of the year (e.g. summer break, winter break, spring break.)
Need to address and support the California mandated paper-reduction initiative.
Legacy system was unable to report on all fields within the application because data was stored in data structures outside of the database.
Database fields and table structures were inconsistent and differed across school districts and states. This created inefficiencies in regards to the maintenance and support of the application.

Metova developed a new solution which delivered the following results:

Using AWS VMs, reduced monthly environment expenses by ~50%.
Developed a multi-tenant SaaS platform, allowing for multiple districts to be hosted within a single database instance.
Support reporting for all fields stored in the AWS database.
Scalable to stand up new School districts or states as needed. Site set up could be scripted and run on predefined schedules.
Introduced the ability to quickly create additional sites for training and demos as needed.
Dynamic event scheduling via AWS (e.g. reduce front-end resources over long weekends, holidays, breaks, or scale up during peak times of the year.)
A more flexible UX & process flow, collapsing older forms into fewer pages for teachers to fill out.

AWS – uses EC2 & RDS for scalability and cost management
Security for HIPAA / FERPA compliance enforced within the multi-tenant structure and restricting end users from accessing the actual AWS environment. User roles and permissions are defined by admins and prevented from viewing sensitive information while access to the db is restricted to approved SEAS personnel.