Banner Cloud Migration

Banner Cloud

The Enterprise Technologies division of UM Information Technology was engaged in a project to move our Ellucian Banner systems off on-premises hardware and into the Ellucian Managed Cloud. Doing so increases efficiency and capabilities for all Banner users, including employees and students. Included in those benefits, this change provides UM users:

  • improved operational capabilities, by leveraging modern technologies available to us within newer versions of Banner and tightly integrated services
  • improved uptime, by locating services off-site and with industry leading providers with resilient backup and contingency plans
  • improved support infrastructure, by partnering with Ellucian subject-matter experts to prevent and address issues

Planned Banner Outage: Status

The go-live event for our cloud Banner production environment was successfully completed on October 4th, 2023! The concluding project activities through October and November have consisted of stabilization of our environment, creation of our non-production environments in the cloud, and working with our Ellucian assurance representative to create new schedules and workflows for updates, releases, and fixes.

Planned Banner Outage: Overview

 Visual of week schedule of Banner outage

The Ellucian Managed Cloud Migration sub-project, also known as the Banner Cloud Migration, culminated with a planned outage of our on-premises and cloud Banner production environments, Friday September 29th to Wednesday October 4th. During this time, Banner was taken offline in a planned outage event and was not available for end-user access including web portals, reports, or processes. Validation of the cloud environment occurred on Monday October 2nd through Wednesday October 4th, and once UM signed-off on the cloud environment it was placed into live production and available for users again.

This outage was an 18-month effort in planning, configuring, and testing, and was a necessary step to finish moving Banner to the cloud. Work in the planning and preparation for this effort involved UM IT and many UM functional units, including Business Services, Financial Aid, Office of the Registrar, Admissions, and Human Resource Services. Since the impact of this planned outage was so broad, the date of this change was coordinated between these groups to minimize impact to normal UM operations and planned over a weekend to minimize business operation disruption.

Additional Information

Additional Project Links:

Launch UM virtual tour.