CIO of the Perth-based university, Peter Nikoletatos, said the rollout of Microsoft Office 365 and live@edu has meant the IT team have been able to turn their attention to greater IT projects.

"Our students can access Curtin anywhere, anytime and that was the rationale behind it," he said.

"It also removes us from the supply chain so we can only add value."

After ditching the university's ageing Linux system for Office 365, Nikoletatos said he chose to deploy rather than Google in order to continue the university's relationship with the vendor.

"We chose to go with Microsoft and not Google because we saw Microsoft as one of our strategic partners," he said.