Case Study: University College of Northern Denmark (UCN) achieves stable, reliable IT and improved user satisfaction with Microsoft Azure

Denmark University College moves operations to the cloud for a revolutionary transformation

University College of Northern Denmark (UCN), a higher-education institution with about 1,000 employees and 10,000 students, faced falling student and staff satisfaction as its on‑premises data center and IT operations struggled to keep up. The IT department was stuck in “firefighting” mode with poor uptime and service quality, so the newly appointed CIO opted to explore an external sourcing strategy rather than try to fix everything internally.

UCN executed a bold cloud migration strategy—moving to SaaS (Office 365), NaaS, Print as a Service and lifting core workloads to Microsoft Azure with partners Timengo and Axpoint—shutting down over 200 on‑site servers (90 retired, 65 moved to Azure, 40 shifted to O365, 12 dedicated to vertical functions). The result was stable, secure, evergreen IT services, markedly higher user satisfaction, faster access to digital tools, freed IT capacity for business development, and a surprising improvement in the financial outlook as IT expenditures fell below prior forecasts.

UCN

René Storgaard Madsen

CIO