Case Study
Xavier University
Xavier University operates 485 Cascade CMS sites across academic departments, programs, athletics, and administrative units. eWay consolidated the platform onto a single modern AWS hosting environment with Multi-AZ resilience, Auto Scaling, Redis caching, Web Application Firewall protection, and eight CodePipelines delivering CI/CD across site clusters. The consolidation moved every one of the 485 sites onto the new environment without data loss or downtime.
- Industry
- Higher Education
- Platform
- Cascade Website Hosting on AWS
- Services
- Managed WebOps + Cloud Operations + CMS Lifecycle Management
- Engagement
- Ongoing
Client Snapshot
About Xavier University
- Founded
- 1831 (Jesuit Catholic institution with a 200-year academic legacy)
- Scale
- Approximately 5,600 students, 80+ undergraduate and graduate programs, 485 Cascade CMS sites across the university
- Website
- www.xavier.edu
Xavier University is a Jesuit Catholic institution in Cincinnati, Ohio, shaped by two centuries of rigorous academics, faith, and service. The university serves approximately 5,600 students across more than 80 undergraduate and graduate programs, with a 98% student success rate and strong programs in liberal arts, business, pre-medical studies, and service-oriented education.
Xavier's digital footprint spans 485 Cascade CMS sites that cover academic departments, individual programs, athletics, faculty pages, administrative units, and student services. Together they form one of the larger Cascade CMS deployments in higher education, reflecting the breadth of an institution where each program and unit maintains its own voice within the broader university brand.
The web presence carries the recruiting, enrollment, alumni, and operational weight that responsibility implies. Its availability, performance, and security posture have direct consequences for admissions cycles, athletics-driven traffic surges, and the everyday work of every department in the university.
The Challenge
485 Cascade sites on fragmented hosting that could not scale or unify.
Xavier's 485 Cascade CMS sites had grown over time across different hosting environments, managed by different teams, built to address immediate needs rather than long-term digital strategy. Infrastructure was siloed, inconsistently maintained, and difficult to scale as institutional demands grew.
Institutional digital needs had expanded significantly across the years. Sites supported student portals, faculty dashboards, online applications, CRM integrations, learning management systems, payment gateways, and other third-party tools. Increased traffic during admissions cycles, events, and result announcements stressed the legacy infrastructure. Performance bottlenecks, downtime risk, and limited integration flexibility were everyday realities.
The legacy environments also struggled with modern requirements: scalability, automated backups, disaster recovery, proactive monitoring, robust security controls, accessibility standards, data protection regulations, and mobile responsiveness. Meeting these without significant upgrades or custom workarounds was difficult. Xavier needed a centralized, scalable, secure hosting solution that could consolidate all 485 sites under one modern operational model.
What the legacy environment could not deliver
Fragmented hosting across 485 sites with inconsistent performance and security posture
Performance bottlenecks during admissions cycles and athletic-event traffic surges
Limited automated backup, disaster recovery, and proactive monitoring
Difficult to meet modern accessibility, data protection, and mobile responsiveness standards
No unified deployment workflow across the site network
Risk of downtime when individual hosting environments needed maintenance
The Solution
A unified AWS hosting environment built on Security by Design.
eWay designed and built a modern AWS hosting environment that consolidates all 485 Cascade CMS sites under one platform. Security is embedded at every layer rather than bolted on after the fact. High availability is achieved through Multi-AZ deployment with Auto Scaling. Redis caching keeps response times fast. Eight automated CodePipelines deliver granular CI/CD across site clusters so deployments to one cluster do not put the rest of the network at risk.
Consolidation of 485 Cascade CMS sites onto a unified AWS hosting environment without data loss or downtime
Multi-AZ deployment with Auto Scaling for high availability and dynamic capacity during admissions and event-driven traffic surges
Redis caching to reduce database load and keep response times consistent under peak usage
Eight automated CodePipelines using AWS CodePipeline and CodeDeploy for independent, risk-isolated deployments across different site clusters and applications
Five Amazon EFS volumes providing shared, scalable storage across the decentralized application architecture for consistent web assets
AWS WAF protecting against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, bot attacks, and common web threats
CDN-backed static asset delivery for fast page loads across the visitor base
Bastion-host configuration for controlled administrative access, with Lambda-triggered CodeDeploy for automated instance provisioning
Vue.js application engineering, including bug fixing and front-end optimization for Vue.js-based applications
Penetration testing and ongoing security assessments to keep the environment hardened
Cascade CMS lifecycle management including update deployment across the integrated application ecosystem
Architecture
A glimpse of the stack
Application
Cascade Website Hosting (485 Cascade CMS publish targets on AWS)
Cloud Infrastructure
AWS Multi-AZ with Auto Scaling, Redis caching, and five EFS volumes for shared storage
CI/CD
Eight CodePipelines with CodeDeploy for granular cluster-level deployments
Edge & Security
AWS WAF, CDN, IAM with Principle of Least Privilege, Bastion-host administrative access
The Outcome
One unified platform for 485 sites, with the resilience the institution needs.
485 sites consolidated, zero downtime
Every one of the 485 Cascade CMS sites moved onto the new AWS environment without data loss or service interruption. The transition was structured site cluster by site cluster rather than as a single cutover, giving each cluster its own verified migration path.
Resilient through admissions and athletic-event spikes
Multi-AZ deployment provides redundancy across availability zones. Auto Scaling adjusts resources dynamically during admissions cycles, athletic events, and news-driven surges. Redis caching keeps response times consistent even when traffic peaks.
Deployment velocity without single points of failure
Eight CodePipelines deliver independent CI/CD across site clusters. A deployment issue in one cluster does not block the rest of the network. Granular updates replace the all-or-nothing release cycle the legacy environment forced.
Hardened by design
IAM with Principle of Least Privilege, AWS WAF on the OWASP Top 10, penetration testing, and Bastion-host administrative access form a multi-layer security posture appropriate for a university's primary digital channel. Security is part of the architecture rather than an afterthought.
Xavier's 485 Cascade CMS sites now run on a unified AWS hosting environment that consolidates fragmented legacy hosting into one operationally consistent platform. eWay continues to operate the environment end to end, including Cascade CMS lifecycle management, Vue.js application engineering, security testing, and the ongoing CI/CD discipline that keeps the platform current as the university's digital footprint evolves.
Common questions about this engagement
What buyers ask before engaging us on a project like Xavier University
How does one platform host 485 sites without becoming a single point of failure?
The architecture is intentionally decentralized at the cluster level even though it is centralized at the platform level. Eight CodePipelines deliver independent CI/CD across site clusters so deployment problems in one cluster do not impact the others. Five Amazon EFS volumes provide shared storage across application groups, with site clusters mapped to storage volumes that suit their content patterns. Multi-AZ deployment provides redundancy across availability zones. The result is a unified platform without the brittle 'one config, one deploy' shape that creates organizational risk at this scale.
What does Cascade CMS lifecycle management include?
Cascade CMS publishes static output to the AWS-hosted infrastructure that eWay operates. Lifecycle management covers Cascade core updates, integration updates with the broader application ecosystem, deployment workflows for editorial and developer changes, and ongoing operational support across all 485 sites. Editorial teams continue to author and publish from Cascade as before; eWay handles the platform underneath.
How does the platform handle traffic surges during admissions cycles and athletic events?
Auto Scaling adjusts compute capacity dynamically as traffic increases. Multi-AZ deployment distributes capacity across availability zones for redundancy. Redis caching reduces database load by serving frequent reads from memory rather than re-querying the database. The combination absorbs admissions-deadline traffic, athletic-event spikes, and news-driven surges without operator intervention.
Why eight CodePipelines instead of one?
Site clusters at Xavier have different deployment cadences, different dependency surfaces, and different risk profiles. A single pipeline would force every change to navigate the same release gate, slowing the work and increasing blast radius when something goes wrong. Eight independent pipelines let academic-department sites, athletics sites, administrative sites, and other clusters deploy on their own cadence with their own validation steps. Granular updates replace the all-or-nothing release pattern.
What does Vue.js application engineering have to do with Cascade hosting?
Several applications integrated into Xavier's broader digital ecosystem are built in Vue.js. eWay provides specialized bug fixing and front-end optimization for those applications alongside the Cascade hosting work. Owning both the hosting layer and the application layer means front-end issues, deployment issues, and infrastructure issues are scoped through one team rather than handed off across vendor boundaries.
What does eWay actually own day-to-day?
eWay owns the AWS hosting environment, Cascade CMS lifecycle management, the eight CodePipelines, the five EFS volumes, the WAF rules, the IAM configuration, the Vue.js application engineering, and the ongoing security and penetration-testing program. The university's editorial teams continue to author and publish content from Cascade. The university's IT team focuses on strategic initiatives rather than day-to-day platform operations.
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