UTN bolsters data security with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Blockchain
The Ecuadorian university boosts service offering and increases data security on OCI while making academic degrees immutable with Oracle Blockchain.
“Moving our solutions to Oracle Cloud has been our best technological decision ever. We are the only university in Ecuador that has all its services in the cloud. That is crucial for us, as it gives visibility and prestige to our institution.”
Business challenges
Universidad Técnica del Norte (UTN) is a higher education institution in Ibarra, Ecuador. Founded in 1986, the university offers 36 undergraduate degrees as well as several masters programs to around 18,000 students.
To store a growing volume of student data and degree-related information, UTN had deployed an on-premises database in its existing data center located within the university’s facilities. Soon after implementing the database in 2008, a series of cyberattacks hit public and private companies in Ecuador.
To mitigate the threat of such attacks, the university considered building an additional data center to serve as a recovery environment in case of an IT disaster. However, building and equipping a second data center implied a significant financial investment.
Furthermore, the country’s attorney general had raised concerns about the university’s process for generating academic certificates. The Quick Response (QR) code system used for certifying academic degrees and titles shared a general-purpose database with the university’s staff—incurring the risk that QR codes could be altered both by internal and external attacks.
As a result, the university looked at implementing technology to guarantee the absence of human interference with the QR code validation process and certify the signatures on its documents. Implementing such a certification would eliminate any doubt about the legality of the institution’s academic degrees and titles.
Why UTN chose Oracle
The organization chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for its security, performance, and storage capabilities as well as the excellent price-performance ratio of Oracle Cloud. The university also selected Oracle Blockchain to help ensure that academic degrees and titles are certified and unfalsifiable.
Results
UTN now relies on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to safely host the institution’s integrated applications. Today, more than 42 modules reside in a single centralized database in Oracle Enterprise Database Service. By choosing OCI rather than investing in a second physical data center, UTN saved an estimated US$1.2 million over three years.
UTN’s applications are hosted in an Oracle Tier-4 data center, one of six other data centers in Latin America of this level. The university has also eliminated the threat of external and internal cyberattacks by deploying all services in Oracle Cloud, which helps protect all data, systems, and applications against denial of service attacks, ransomware, or structured query language (SQL) code injection.
The university has also realized considerable performance improvements in its services. After three years hosting its full range of services on OCI, performance has increased approximately 7X as compared to the on-premises infrastructure, while access to data saw a 5X improvement in the first year alone.
As for the security of UTN’s academic degrees and titles, the university now uses Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service to generate academic titles in a collaborative framework. The highly available, secure, and scalable blockchain-as-a-service enables a secure replacement of physical signatures with electronic signatures and complements the legality of the document with unique QR codes. Oracle Blockchain validates that the information reflected in the title is real and ensures that the information therein cannot be manipulated.