40% Cost Savings and Anywhere Access via End User Computing on AWS

The University of Limassol (UoL) recently transitioned from its identity as the Cyprus International Institute of Management (CIIM) — a 30-year institution of academic excellence — into a full university offering undergraduate and graduate degrees across business, technology, economics, and finance, with campuses in Limassol and Nicosia.

This transformation brought immediate digital infrastructure demands. UoL needed to deploy SAP Business One for financial management and Odoo for student management — both requiring a highly secure, available, resilient, and scalable cloud environment accessible to administrative staff, faculty, and students across both campuses and beyond.

The goal was a gradual, low-disruption AWS transition that would quickly demonstrate value: provide virtual desktops accessible from any device, anywhere, without requiring costly hardware refreshes or complex per-device software deployments — while protecting sensitive student and financial data.

LCM Go Cloud designed a secure, highly available AWS architecture built on AWS best practices. At the core, Amazon WorkSpaces delivers managed virtual desktops to all university users — administrative staff with SAP Business One access, faculty and student services staff with Odoo, and all users with Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus — from any supported device, at any time.

The underlying infrastructure uses a multi-AZ deployment with Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling for resilience, Amazon Aurora (MSSQL-compatible) in primary and replica configuration for database high availability, and Amazon S3 with AWS Backup for durable storage. A Site-to-Site VPN connects UoL's on-premises environment securely to the AWS VPC, while NAT Gateways, security groups, and AWS IAM enforce network segmentation and access control throughout.

A TCO assessment comparing traditional PC hardware against Amazon WorkSpaces over a 5-year period confirmed an estimated 40% annual cost saving — factoring in device refresh cycles, failure rates, IT overhead, and the cost of capital — validating the cloud-first decision before a single line of infrastructure was provisioned.