National Universities Commission (NUC) – Cloud Migration & Modernization
Transnetcloud
20 Jan 2025
National University Commission
About NUC
AThe National Universities Commission is a Nigerian government agency set up to regulate higher education in Nigeria. NUC, as it is popularly called, was established in 1962 as an advisory agency in the cabinet office. In 1974, it became a statutory body and its first executive secretary was professor Jibril Aminu.
Industry
Education & Government
Location
6, Aguiyi Ironsi street PMB 237 Garki GPO, Maitama, Abuja
Overview
The National Universities Commission (NUC)—Nigeria’s federal body for university oversight—partnered with Transnet Cloud to modernize its national university regulatory infrastructure. With a vision to deliver more secure, scalable, and efficient digital services for Nigeria’s education system, the Commission undertook a full-scale migration and modernization of its core platforms to AWS. This transformation ensured regulatory agility, compliance, and operational resilience across the nation’s rapidly growing academic ecosystem.
Challenge
NUC operated on aging, on-premise systems that were costly to maintain and increasingly insufficient to meet the digital demands of modern university governance. Downtime during national evaluation periods, security concerns, rigid infrastructure scaling, and high maintenance costs limited the Commission’s ability to innovate and respond to evolving educational policy needs.
AWS Cloud Growth Solution & Implementation
Transnet Cloud, an AWS Partner, delivered a tailored Cloud Migration Strategy using AWS Cloud Migration Services. Key components of the architecture included
Amazon EC2 for scalable compute capacity
Amazon RDS for secure, managed database workloads
Amazon Route 53 for reliable DNS resolution
Amazon VPC to isolate workloads in a secure, multi-AZ network
AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) for advanced threat protection
This architecture offered a highly available, secure, and auto-scalable environment, with AWS-native tools enabling cost optimization, backup automation, and performance monitoring across NUC’s services.
AWS Services Used:
Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, AWS WAF, Amazon Route 53, Amazon VPC, AWS Cloud Migration Services
Outcomes & Success Metrics
- The migration resulted in significant operational improvements:
- 60% Increase in Application Performance
- 40% Reduction in Infrastructure Costs
- Improved security posture, validated through AWS compliance and monitoring tools
- Zero downtime during peak periods such as national university accreditation rounds
- Elastic scalability to accommodate dynamic traffic from over 200 Nigerian universities and stakeholders
Lessons Learned
Key lessons included:
Early stakeholder buy-in, especially from NUC‘s internal IT teams, was essential for a smooth transition.
A phased migration plan with rigorous testing helped uncover legacy data dependencies before full cutover.
Establishing a clear cloud governance framework ensured that the migration complied with Nigeria’s public sector data policies and education standards.
Use Cases
Database Modernization, Secure Storage, Compute & Infrastructure Optimization
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