Case Study: Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana achieves petabyte-scale, cost-effective analytics and rapid student insights with Amazon Web Services

Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana - Customer Case Study

Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, the largest community college in the U.S. with about 170,000 students and a 1.7 million‑record student database across 23 campuses, faced major scaling and performance challenges. Its operational data store and reporting systems suffered extreme delays—queries taking ~40 minutes and routine reports up to eight hours—and the school needed faster student‑performance monitoring and affordable data‑warehouse options without multimillion‑dollar vendor costs.

Ivy Tech moved raw data to Amazon S3, archives to Amazon Glacier, and runs analytics in Amazon Redshift with Pentaho and Wolfram Mathematica for reporting and predictive models. The change cut query times to as little as three seconds, enabled near‑real‑time fraud detection and machine‑learning predictions (over 70% accuracy) to identify struggling students, and reduced licensing and operational costs by about 60% while scaling to petabyte‑level data needs.

Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana

Lige Hensley

CTO