Case Study: Education First achieves faster application performance and reduced latency on AWS with KEMP Technologies

EF embraces AWS Cloud and Kemp to boost application performance

Education First, a global leader in international education, faced rising pressure on its US data centre as student demand in the Asia‑Pacific region grew to 6,000–7,000 connections per second. During a staged migration of core applications to AWS the company found its existing F5 load balancers unsuitable for cloud deployment, resulting in increased latency (around 300 ms) and constrained IT resources. Education First selected KEMP Technologies to address these cloud-ready load‑balancing needs.

KEMP Technologies deployed virtual and appliance LoadMaster solutions (two VLM-2000 and six VLM-200 units) optimized for AWS, providing L7 traffic distribution, session persistence, SSL acceleration and other features to stabilize peak loads. The KEMP deployment cut average latency from ~300 ms to ~200 ms, improved download speeds and application responsiveness under heavy load, and helped Education First reduce IT headcount from about 30 to 4 while achieving comparable functionality at roughly 40% lower cost than rivals.

Education First