Case Study
Morehead State University
Morehead State University's public-facing website is the front door for prospective students, families, alumni, and donors across eastern Kentucky. eWay rebuilt the platform on AWS with auto-scaling, CloudFront edge delivery, WAF protection, and disaster recovery built in. The architecture was tested in 2023 when a campus-wide cyber event hit MSU's broader systems. The public website kept operating without interruption.
- Industry
- Higher Education
- Platform
- Cascade Website Hosting on AWS
- Services
- Managed WebOps + Cloud Operations
- Engagement
- Ongoing
Client Snapshot
About Morehead State University
- Founded
- 1887
- Scale
- 8,600+ students, 65 undergraduate majors, 16:1 student-faculty ratio
- Website
- www.moreheadstate.edu
Morehead State University is a leading public regional university in eastern Kentucky, serving 8,600+ students across undergraduate and graduate programs from its main campus in Morehead with additional locations in Ashland, Mt. Sterling, and Prestonsburg.
Founded in 1887, MSU is a 2023–2024 College of Distinction recognized for its focus on student success and academic excellence. The institution holds a Carnegie Classification as a Research College and University, and has been ranked among the best public regional universities in the South. Notable alumni span sports, entertainment, and the arts, including former NFL quarterback Phil Simms, NBA's Kenneth Faried, and Tony Award-winning actor Steve Kazee.
The MSU website is the primary recruiting and information channel for prospective students, families, faculty, alumni, and donors. Its availability and performance have direct enrollment and engagement consequences.
The Challenge
Legacy hosting that couldn't scale, secure, or stand up under pressure.
MSU's website is the front door for a diverse audience of prospective students, families, faculty, alumni, and donors. The legacy hosting setup made it difficult to manage increasing traffic, meet uptime goals, and support the institution's digital growth.
Internal IT had limited visibility into site performance and was relying on manual, time-consuming deployment workflows. The infrastructure couldn't scale on demand during peak admissions cycles, athletic events, or news-driven traffic surges. The on-premises architecture had not kept pace with modern security expectations, and managing redirects or SEO-friendly URLs at scale was difficult.
MSU needed a modern, cloud-first hosting solution tailored to higher education that could scale on demand, improve uptime, harden security, and reduce operational risk for a campus IT team that did not have the bandwidth to operate web infrastructure as a full-time discipline.
Where the legacy setup fell short
Limited visibility into site performance
Manual, time-consuming deployment workflows
No scalable infrastructure for admissions and event-driven traffic
Security exposure from aging on-premises architecture
Difficulty managing redirects and SEO-friendly URLs at scale
The Solution
AWS-powered infrastructure purpose-built for higher education.
MSU partnered with eWay Corp, an AWS Partner with deep experience in higher education and Cascade Website Hosting. Together, MSU and eWay replatformed the university's web presence using AWS cloud infrastructure. The result is a dual-environment (production and staging) deployment designed for agility, performance, and security, operated end to end by eWay.
Replatformed MSU's web presence to AWS with a dual-environment (production and staging) configuration purpose-built for higher education
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups absorb traffic fluctuations across admissions cycles, athletic events, and news-driven surges
Application Load Balancer ensures fault tolerance and zero-downtime updates
Amazon CloudFront CDN delivers content from edge locations close to prospective students, families, and alumni wherever they are
AWS WAF protects against OWASP vulnerabilities, bot attacks, and other application-layer threats
Automated DevOps pipelines from Cascade CMS eliminate manual deployment work for the campus IT team
Architecture
A glimpse of the stack
Application
Cascade Website Hosting (Cascade CMS publish target on AWS)
Cloud Infrastructure
AWS: EC2 Auto Scaling, Application Load Balancer
Edge & Security
Amazon CloudFront CDN, AWS WAF
Deploy & Recovery
Automated DevOps pipelines, backup aligned to defined RPO and RTO
The Outcome
Near-zero downtime, faster delivery, and a quieter IT calendar.
Stayed online during a campus-wide cyber event
When a 2023 ransomware incident threatened MSU's broader campus systems, the public-facing website continued operating without interruption. The cloud-first, security-forward architecture had been engineered for exactly this kind of pressure test, and it held.
Always-on through admissions cycles
Auto Scaling and the Application Load Balancer absorb traffic surges during admissions cycles, major athletic events, and news-driven spikes without operator intervention from the campus IT team.
Faster everywhere it matters
CloudFront delivers content from edge locations close to prospective students, families, and alumni wherever they are. Page-load performance improved measurably across the visitor base.
Hands-off deployment
Automated DevOps pipelines from Cascade CMS eliminated manual deployment work, returning hours back to the campus IT team for more strategic priorities.
MSU's public website now runs on a fully-managed Cascade-on-AWS platform that combines auto-scaling, CDN delivery, WAF protection, and disaster recovery as a single operational model. eWay continues to operate the environment under SLA, with optimization, security patching, and incident response handled by the eWay team rather than the campus IT staff.
“From the outset, eWay Corp acted as a true strategic partner, working closely with our internal team and key vendors. Their reliability and technical excellence have given us the confidence that our website is in expert hands.”
April Hobbs Nutter · Director of Strategic Communications, Morehead State University
Common questions about this engagement
What buyers ask before engaging us on a project like Morehead State University
Why move to AWS specifically for a higher education website?
AWS provides the scalability, security, and global delivery capabilities that universities need for prospective-student-facing websites. The combination of EC2 Auto Scaling for traffic surges, CloudFront for edge delivery, and AWS WAF for security gives an institution enterprise-grade infrastructure without the operational burden of running it on premises. eWay's experience with Cascade Website Hosting on AWS made the partnership a natural fit for a Cascade-published site.
What happens during peak admissions traffic?
EC2 Auto Scaling Groups bring additional instances online automatically as traffic increases. The Application Load Balancer distributes requests across the fleet. When traffic returns to baseline, instances scale back down. This handles admissions cycles, athletic events, and news-driven surges without requiring manual capacity planning from the campus IT team.
How is the site protected from cyber threats?
AWS WAF protects against OWASP vulnerabilities, bot attacks, and other application-layer threats. The dual-environment configuration enables safe testing of changes before deployment. Automated backups and recovery procedures meet defined RPO and RTO requirements. The architecture is designed to remain operational even when other parts of an organization's infrastructure are compromised, as MSU's experience during a 2023 cyber event demonstrated.
How does Cascade CMS work with this AWS setup?
Cascade CMS publishes static output to AWS-hosted infrastructure that eWay operates as part of the Cascade Website Hosting offering. Automated DevOps pipelines handle the deployment of published content from Cascade to the production environment, with the staging environment available for safe pre-release testing. The editorial team continues to author and publish from Cascade exactly as before.
What does eWay actually own day-to-day?
eWay owns the AWS environment end to end: infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, security patching, performance optimization, and incident response under SLA. The campus IT team works on strategic initiatives rather than the operational maintenance of the web platform. New features, additional capacity, or platform changes are scoped, built, and deployed by eWay rather than handed off to a separate vendor.
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