Case Study: Singapore University of Social Sciences achieves 70% faster access to course materials and 50% infrastructure cost savings with Amazon Web Services

Singapore University of Social Sciences Drives Lifelong Learning with AWS

Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), one of six national universities in Singapore with about 15,000 mainly working students across 70 programs, needed to deliver flexible, mobile-first e-learning because many students juggle work and family. Its initial on-premises infrastructure tied up a small IT team and caused poor performance—students sometimes waited up to 10 seconds to access course files and videos.

In 2012 SUSS migrated its apps to AWS, using EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, S3, RDS and notification services to gain managed maintenance, scalability, and pay-as-you-go economics. The move reduced access times to about 3 seconds (roughly 70% faster), delivered 99.999% availability, cut infrastructure costs by 50%, and freed staff to focus on developing new application features—making lifelong learning more accessible and reliable.

Singapore University of Social Sciences

Lee Chye Seng

Director of Learning Systems and Applications