Once these hurdles are cleared, there are baseline technology questions that must be considered. These questions depend on the technology inside the campus or the technology that’s necessary to move to the cloud. In terms of the IT organization, you’re potentially talking about major change and modifications to the operating environment they have been accustomed to, and are comfortable in.
This includes the infrastructure vendors they select, the maintenance agreements that they have in place, and technology questions from storage to networking to computing capacity. Also, on the IT side, it is critically important to consider integration: If these business applications are being moved off campus, how do they integrate back to campus?
From the business side, there is a big impact on the user community; how big depends on the equipment and systems already in place.
There are campuses that are still using green screen terminals off of a mainframe to do their work. In moving to the cloud, these schools are changing from older PC-based platforms to more up-to-date ones capable of running browser sessions and multiple windows.
While the benefits of cloud computing in a college environment can be substantial, there are pitfalls that must be avoided. The primary pitfall to be aware of begins with the actual choice of the cloud vendor.
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Because the field is relatively new, it’s easy for small-scale, back-of-the-garage outfits to start up a cloud business and position themselves as a knowledgeable cloud vendor. Consequently, the question becomes, does the cloud vendor really understand your business and do they have the wherewithal, certification and demonstrated success in the educational environment to ensure that your information—as well as your business applications—are being managed properly?
The SaaS Analogy
The introduction of software as a service (SaaS) provided an analogous situation.
Organizations had been focusing the bulk of their attention on their data center, including its physical layout and equipment. But the emergence of SaaS required a different mindset. All of the vendor data centers would have raised floors, halon fire extinguishers, and make a host of other adjustments.
But those requirements pale in comparison to how the vendor operates, how they protect data, and who has access to the servers. Those were the critical questions that had to be asked and answered for the concept to take off—just as they are today in the cloud computing arena.
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