Challenge
Universidad Iberoamericana (IBERO), one of the primary educational institutions in Mexico with over 13,000 students[1], faced challenges in enhancing the user experience for students, professors, and administrative staff, while also ensuring the security of its sensitive data and digital assets against potential cyber-attacks.
The university’s domain servers were operating on an outdated system, which required configuration through command lines, leading to a lengthy learning process and manual configuration requirements.
“At the university, we inherited DNS platforms many years ago. Our servers weren’t kept up to date. It was necessary to learn all the processes involved, so creating a domain could take up to 40 minutes,” said Juan Carlos Delgado, a Specialist Engineer at the Directorate of Information Technology and Telecommunications at IBERO.
In addition, Universidad Iberoamericana aimed to ensure accessibility for exchange students connecting from foreign countries and during enrollment periods when the system faced high traffic. The primary objective was to prevent domain failures, mitigate cyberattacks, and minimize IT costs for the institution.
However, the need for improved performance and connectivity and the evolving complexities of the cybersecurity landscape compelled IBERO to update its technology. This update was essential to enhance its defense posture in a simplified and seamless manner, enabling smooth integration with its internal systems.
Solution
After months of testing and evaluating multiple providers, Universidad Iberoamericana decided to partner with Azion due to its low latency, high speed, and straightforward implementation process.
Initially, benchmark tests were conducted to measure the website’s performance. A dedicated test page was created, and thousands of user interactions were simulated and executed using scripts. The results demonstrated that Azion delivered the fastest and most efficient response times, enabling updates and changes to be implemented within seconds.
“Laboratories were set up to enable users to test the solutions. Once in operation, the different domains were compared and later tested with the directors and stakeholders. It was necessary to determine which provider offered us the best service, and Azion was the one that provided the best solution,” said Delgado.
This is how Universidad Iberoamericana implemented Edge DNS, a modern and updated DNS solution that enabled the university’s domains to be re-engineered. This implementation made it possible to achieve fast response times and ensure DNS reliability to prevent system outages and provide strong protection against complex threats such as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
Currently, the university’s infrastructure and security teams work closely with Azion. In addition to Edge DNS, they adopted solutions such as Azion’s WAF and Cache to protect their website and applications from threats while simultaneously improving the overall user experience.
Results and Impact
The implementation of Azion’s solutions had a profound impact at Universidad Iberoamericana, which can be summarized as follows:
- Response times were drastically reduced, which has improved the efficiency of managing domains
- Their web platform is more secure and stable, preventing problems during enrollment periods and ensuring a smooth experience for students
- The re-engineering of domains enabled resource optimization and a significant cost reduction
- 50% of unproductive domains were removed with the assistance of Azion’s engineering team
- The implementation of a hybrid environment enables both Azion and IBERO to respond to requests, ensuring high service availability
“Managing our domains has become much easier from a technical standpoint, which has allowed us to feel calmer, go home, and sleep more peacefully, trusting the technology to do its job as intended in the implementation processes,” said Enrique Collin, Director of Information Technologies at IBERO.
In conclusion, adopting edge computing solutions has successfully minimized the risks of outages in IBERO’s environments, ensuring continuous operation.
“Azion provided fast and efficient response times, allowing updates and changes to be made within seconds.”
Juan Carlos Delgado, Specialist Engineer at IBERO
About IBERO
Universidad Iberoamericana is a higher education institution comprising professors and students. With the collaboration of their employees and alumni, its primary purpose is preserving, transmitting, and advancing objective higher culture. These goals are achieved through the training of professionals, teachers, researchers, and technicians that Mexico requires, as well as through scientific research and the comprehensive and humane formation of those who attend its classrooms.
Reference
[1] IBERO tiene el objetivo de ayudar al desarrollo social nacional: Rector