Kherson National Technical University evacuated more than 20 terabytes of sensitive digital records to the cloud in hours as Russian troops closed in on the southern Ukrainian city.
The emergency data migration preserved academic research, personnel files, and military mobilization records equivalent to over five million books, preventing Russian forces from seizing the information when they occupied Kherson on March 1, 2022.
The university had housed its primary data center on the second floor of its main campus building when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
During the initial days of the occupation, an archivist entered the university building and set fire to paper records. While the fire eliminated physical documents, identical digital copies remained stored on local servers, turning the data center into a primary security risk for staff and families.
Emergency Cloud Migration
To secure the information without destroying it, the university IT team contacted the Ukrainian Research and Academic Network, known as URAN. URAN partnered with Microsoft to organize a rapid transfer of the university archives to cloud infrastructure, a project that normally requires months of technical planning.
URAN provides high-speed network infrastructure to Ukrainian scientific and academic institutions. Microsoft provided cloud migration resources through Azure, its global cloud computing platform designed for secure enterprise storage.
Executing the transfer required dangerous physical access to the occupied building. Oleh Artemenko, head of the university IT team, was trapped on the far side of the Dnieper River, leaving local operations to a female IT employee who crossed armed Russian military checkpoints daily.
The Dnieper River splits the Kherson region in southern Ukraine, creating major logistical barriers during the early invasion. The staff member navigated checkpoint inspections while carrying system access keys on portable drives into the data center, where an unexploded missile lay outside the ground floor windows.
Bypassing Network Restrictions
The IT team conducted data transfers primarily at night to avoid drawing the attention of Russian forces, who had compromised local internet routers and disrupted communications infrastructure.
A major crisis occurred when local connection speeds dropped to 10 megabits per second, a speed that would typically require at least 20 days to upload 20 terabytes of data. Because local internet service providers under Russian control throttled bandwidth per connection rather than total concurrent connections, Artemenko wrote custom scripts to divide the data into thousands of small fragments.
Artemenko utilized Microsoft AzCopy, a specialized command-line transfer tool designed to synchronize files directly between servers and Azure cloud storage. The script launched thousands of parallel connections simultaneously, streaming data fragments out of Kherson in unnoticeable traffic streams.
The migration team enforced a strict integrity policy requiring every data fragment to be uploaded and verified in the cloud before the original copy in Kherson was deleted. Once the final file was confirmed secure, Artemenko issued a remote command to lock the physical hard drives, leaving empty hardware inside the occupied building.
Digital Identity and Continued Operations
Alongside raw data files, the university migrated its administrative authentication systems using Microsoft Entra ID. The identity management software allowed university officials to retain control over user accounts and immediately revoke access to compromised credentials.
Kherson National Technical University now operates as a decentralized institution without a single physical campus. Administrative operations relocated to Khmelnytskyi, a city in western Ukraine, while servers remain secured in cloud infrastructure.
Faculty members conduct lectures and examinations online for students dispersed across Ukraine and international locations, as well as students remaining in Russian-occupied territories.
Preserving Cultural Memory
The digital rescue reflects historical efforts to save cultural heritage recounted in the novel People of the Book by author Geraldine Brooks, published by RBA. The book details how individuals of different faiths protected the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated medieval manuscript, through centuries of war and persecution.
While traditional historical archives were physical objects concealed in walls or suitcases, modern institutional memory consists of digital data that can cross borders instantly. University leaders noted that technological tools provided a second life for institutional memory, ensuring that physical destruction of campus buildings cannot erase the identity or history of the community.
