Case Study: Georgia Institute of Technology achieves scalable, cost-effective emergency communications readiness with Amazon Web Services

Developing an Emergency Communications Plan with Georgia Tech

The Georgia Tech Office of Information Technology needed a resilient way to deliver critical messages during campus emergencies—events like lockdowns, severe weather, or active‑shooter situations that could generate traffic far beyond their on‑premises website’s capacity. With limited time and budget to overbuild or rapidly scale local infrastructure, the team set out to create a single, reliable emergency communications channel that all notification systems and social media would point to.

They redirected emergency traffic to a static site hosted on Amazon S3, supplemented by a simple page‑editor UI running on two EC2 instances behind an ELB; this gave them automatic massive scaling, low cost, built‑in versioning, and a fast mobile‑first design. The solution has proven affordable and robust, trained staff on manual and GUI updates, exposed IT and procurement to AWS practices, and produced a ready, scalable emergency website capable of handling large visitor spikes.

Georgia Institute of Technology