Universidad del Sagrado Corazón disaster recovery efforts earn one of three awards in “IT Infrastructure & Systems”

Imagine your campus has just experienced a massive disaster. You have no power, no water, no cellular service, no fuel for your data center generator, and the roads around your campus are heavily damaged. What would you do?

This worst-case scenario is exactly what Gilberto Marxuach Torrós, the President of  Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, was faced with when Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico in October 2017, destroying most of the island’s infrastructure in the process.

With the help of technology partner Dynamic Campus, Sagrado was able to migrate four core IT systems out of its data center — run entirely on a balky gas generator — and onto an Amazon Web Services server on the mainland in a matter of days.

This quick action on the part of Maxuach’s team and Dynamic Campus allowed Sagrado to register students, issue financial aid and deliver courses on campus and online in less than three weeks.

It also allowed the institution to become the focal point of a comprehensive humanitarian relief effort known as Sagrado Contigo – Sagrado With You – that delivered critical aid and hope to more than 43,000 people, including students, faculty, staff and the surrounding communities in the months that followed Maria.

For these efforts, Sagrado and Dynamic Campus were recognized by Campus Technology, the complete resource for academic and administrative IT leaders in higher education, with an Impact Award for 2018 in the “IT Infrastructure & Systems” category.

In their 14th year, the Campus Technology Impact Awards recognize “colleges and universities that are making an extraordinary impact with technology on campus, doing important work in the service of teaching, learning, administration and operations.”

To find out more about the 2018 Campus Technology Impact Awards and see the full list of winners, click here.