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

Founded in 1959, GEMS Education has become one of the world’s most prominent K-12 private school providers, running leading international independent schools across 10 countries. The company’s mission—to put a quality education within the reach of every learner—guides operations at GEMS’ 66 schools across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia regions, building the skills and knowledge of approximately 174,000 students from more than 175 countries.

As part of its technology disruption journey, GEMS Education has developed its own suite of IP products and solutions, including Phoenix RISE, an end-to-end school management platform; Classroom, an advanced learning management system; HSE, a health and safety and child safeguarding system; Connect, an enterprise mobility platform; Pulse, an education customer relationship management (CRM) system; GEMS Garage, a digital repurposing platform; AppStore, providing a unified view of education apps; and GEMS Alumni, a platform to connect alumni and students. The successful execution of FY18-20 initiatives has resulted in significant efficiency increases (automated 13K+ man-days), customer experience enhancements, huge cost optimization, standardization, technology consolidation, control improvements and secured data and IT assets.

Ensuring all its students have reliable access to educational content is no small feat—particularly with the massive and abrupt shift to online learning triggered by the COVID-19 health crisis. While most schools regionally and across the globe struggled and took months to prepare for the new normal, GEMS Education started from a position of strength due to sustained investments in technology and continuous training provided to its teachers. Indeed, every day as morning dawns on homes across the Middle East, North Africa, and Far East, thousands of GEMS students sign in to the education platform for their lessons. Yet, managing that sudden demand surge and operating a complex multitenant environment are challenges the education giant was able to mitigate, thanks to Microsoft Azure.

Scaling flexibly to meet demand

“You can imagine the early morning digital onslaught we experience, when something like 50,000 or 60,000 students suddenly sign in to the environment for attendance between seven or seven-thirty in the morning,” says Shabeer Mohammed, Head of Technology, GEMS Education. “We needed an environment powerful and flexible enough to manage that load. Sure, we could have purchased any number of servers and put them in our datacenter and then introduced some caching mechanism. But that would have meant spending an hour every morning monitoring and provisioning. Right now, Azure gives us the flexibility of using an environment which is highly adaptable—using Load Balancer or Application Gateway, for example—it can grow and shrink, depending on traffic flows, and we pay for what we use. This is very helpful to manage the morning spike—especially since system loads begin to ease by, say, eight o’clock. It made sense to use the Azure [cloud] platform to do it right.”