Case Study: Pacific Northwest College of Art achieves greater stability and cost savings with Amazon Web Services

Moving Buildings Leads to the All-In Move to the Cloud for Pacific Northwest College of Art

Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), an arts college with under 1,000 students, needed a new IT approach when it moved into a renovated post office. Faced with aging servers, the cost of building a new server room, and the need to protect student data under FERPA, PNCA looked to Amazon Web Services to replace its “old-school environment” with a more modern, secure cloud model.

PNCA worked with Amazon Web Services to move web applications to Amazon EC2 and then expanded to services including Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS. Within 6–12 months, nearly 80% of the college’s applications were on AWS, delivering greater stability, faster performance, improved capabilities, and cost savings—without downtime or weakening service.

Pacific Northwest College of Art

Brennen Florey

Senior Web Developer and one of the Technology Co-Directors