Case Study: Kaplan achieves greater resiliency, cost visibility, and development agility with Amazon Web Services

Kaplan - Customer Case Study

Kaplan, a global education provider serving more than 1.2 million students annually, faced growing infrastructure complexity across multiple divisions and 12 disparate data centers. A two‑week outage of its NYC collocated data center during Tropical Storm Sandy exposed risks from having production and backups in the same location, while end‑of‑life hardware, capacity limits, and mounting PCI/SOC compliance demands made it difficult to scale securely and reliably.

Kaplan migrated development, test, and production environments to AWS—moving about 50 applications (≈900 GB) into Amazon VPC using EC2, RDS, CloudWatch, Route 53, and automation tools like Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation. The move improved resiliency and latency, enabled easier database management, standardized environment provisioning, and increased cost visibility through instance tagging. Kaplan sold legacy equipment, closed the impacted data center, and reduced its footprint from 12 data centers to 4 while continuing to re‑architect applications for further cloud adoption.

Kaplan

Chad Marino

Executive Director of Technology Services