Case Study: GEMS Education scales and secures K-12 learning for 174,000+ students with Microsoft Azure

Top K-12 private education provider GEMS Education embarks on technology disruption journey using Azure

GEMS Education, one of the world’s largest K–12 private school providers with about 174,000 students across 66 schools, launched a “disrupt from within” technology transformation to make education more efficient, scalable, and future-ready. The abrupt shift to online learning and a complex multitenant environment—including morning spikes of roughly 50,000–60,000 student sign‑ins—created urgent needs for elastic scalability, stronger security, streamlined operations, and better analytics.

GEMS migrated its suite of IP products (Phoenix RISE, Classroom, Pulse, and more) to Microsoft Azure and adopted services like Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Azure AD, Azure Security Center, Azure Machine Learning, Dynamics 365, and Power BI. The move enabled elastic scaling to absorb peak demand, improved security and analytics, standardized systems, and delivered cost savings—automating more than 13,000 man-days, enhancing customer experience, and positioning GEMS to pursue advanced AI, mixed‑reality, and blockchain EdTech initiatives.

GEMS Education

Shabeer Mohammed

Head of Technology