Case Study: Gonzaga University accelerates ERP upgrade, strengthens security and disaster recovery with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Oracle)

Gonzaga University upgrades to Oracle Cloud for better security

Gonzaga University needed to upgrade its campus ERP, Ellucian Banner, from version 8 to 9 while pursuing a cloud-first strategy. The on‑premises system ran on 30 virtual machines with a 700 GB Oracle Database and about 80 integrations; IT’s top priorities were maintaining high security standards, adding an off‑site disaster‑recovery capability, and separating production, test, and development resources to reduce risk and recovery times.

Gonzaga moved the ERP to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, choosing OCI for estimated 25% cost savings, bare‑metal performance, easy Oracle Database migration, and seamless integration with its on‑premises Fortinet firewalls. The upgrade finished in seven months (vs. a nine‑month plan), disaster‑recovery failovers now take about 5–10 minutes, many cloud deployments run up to 75% faster, and the savings were reinvested into improved security, DR, and test/dev environments.

Gonzaga University

Darren Owsley

CTO