Since the beginning of the war, specialists from EPAM — the leading IT company in Ukraine — have helped more than ten Ukrainian universities. Together with critical infrastructure, they have migrated their servers to the cloud that enables remote learning. EPAM experts together with the partners from Amazon Web Services have helped universities in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro and other cities. They are ready to provide their support to other higher education institutions (HEI) in the active combat zones.
More than 10 years now EPAM has been investing in the development of technical education and has agreements of cooperation with more than 30 HEIs all over Ukraine. Considering the fact that in certain institutions host their servers and backup data of the critically important information right in their premises, the representatives of EPAM’s educational direction decided to act.
“We see that educational institutions in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv are under attack of extremely devastating blows. That is why we reached out to the universities in Eastern, Central, Southern and other regions and offered help”, - says Denys Hryniov, director of the EPAM educational programs in Ukraine. - “Currently, thanks to the efforts of the EPAM specialists and our partners from Amazon Web Services the critically important infrastructure of 15 HEI is deposited in the AWS cloud storage. Even if buildings and server premises of these institutions suffer or get cut off from electricity, the students will still be able to continue remote learning without interruption. Despite the war, the future specialists will have an opportunity to study”.
This initiative has united more than 20 system engineers, managers and other experts from the EPAM Kharkiv office and Amazon Web Services. They are all safe and are able to do what they are best at. The specialists have helped Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, National Aerospace University “Kharkiv Aviation Institute”, National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”,
National Pharmaceutical University, Karazin KhNU, Semen Kuznets KhNEU, Shevchenko Kyiv National University, Zaporizhzhia National University, Dnipro Polytechnic and others.
“EPAM specialists are in contact with system administrators of the HEIs and work out the details of their requests. They can be different: some are quite basic, others rather complex. The military actions take their toll: sometimes the university reps have no access to the Internet or can’t make it to work due to shelling”, - says Ivan Tkachenko, the project manager, EPAM Ukraine. - “If necessary, the most experienced EPAM specialists help optimize the infrastructure of the universities in terms of technologies and financial resources. We are also in close contact with specialists from Amazon Web Services. They are providing a budget for the cloud storages and can consult in case of complex requests. We greatly value the input of our partners, as this is one of the ways they are supporting Ukraine”.
The experts are working not only with the relevant specialized institutions that have contracts with EPAM, but also with those who need help in setting up a distance learning process. Priority is given to universities caught in hotspots of the war. After the migration, the virtual infrastructure of universities will be available from anywhere in the world.
Ukrainian universities can request such support by contacting Denys_Grynov@epam.com.
