5 things every college must know about cloud computing


Before you migrate to the cloud, you need to develop a strategic approach and map a successful, long-term path

Like many colleges and universities in Ohio, Shawnee State University faced financial pressure from state-led tuition restrictions and a mandate to reduce operating expenses. Its existing IT infrastructure had served it well since its establishment in the late 1980s. But 35 years later, school IT leaders recognized a need and opportunity to modernize by centralizing key applications under a single, unified digital umbrella, allowing administrators to better manage recruitment and serve constituents in a timely way.

Shawnee is just one of many campuses across the nation embracing cloud computing as it has moved into its second decade of existence. Indeed, Gartner’s 2018 CIO Agenda Survey identifies cloud computing as a top-five priority area for new higher tech spending.

Most colleges and universities are considering cloud computing because they recognize its potential for significantly improving financial, operational, and educational processes. At the same time, many know that failing to move to the cloud could create a perception that they are behind the times, which could hamper recruitment efforts with today’s tech-savvy prospective students.

Nonetheless, many universities have been relatively slow to embrace the cloud for a few simple reasons. First, because it’s not always cheap or easy to overhaul IT systems. And second, because cloud represents a fundamental technological change and perceived challenges that many organizations do not feel they have the expertise, bandwidth, or resources to address.

Fortunately, there are ways around these challenges, and it starts by remembering that cloud computing is part of a journey to a modern campus—not the ultimate destination. What’s needed is a strategic approach that combines on-premise services with advanced cloud solutions.

Here are five things to keep in mind when considering moving to the cloud.

1. Be clear about your goals
Industry pundits will tell you that if you’re not in the cloud, you’re costing yourself money and opportunity. And you are not meeting student expectations for a fully digital scholastic experience that mirrors the interaction they have with technology in their private lives. But none of those reasons justify shifting to the cloud because, at the end of the day, any move needs to be about the specific needs and aspirations of each individual school.

Before beginning any migration, clearly determine your goals for cloud computing. Is it about meeting certain government requirements? Is it related to a need to reduce swelling administrative costs? Is it about competing to attract and retain the best and brightest students? Or is it all of the above?

Clearly articulating priorities and potential payoffs will help people throughout your institution focus on the essential aspects of the cloud journey.

2. Take a phased adoption path
While more aggressive institutions will undoubtedly try to shift everything to the cloud at once, the private sector can attest to the difficulty and risk of trying to embrace popular technologies too quickly.

Address the most pressing or most actionable (low-hanging fruit) aspects of your cloud journey first before moving on to less urgent items. If student engagement is a top priority, a business school might tap into a cloud-based marketing solution to deliver targeted student communications across multiple channels. If attracting talented instructors is important, your human resources department could capitalize on a cloud talent-management solution to identify new candidates and better engage them across channels and the entire recruiting process.

Another important aspect that many overlook is that cloud migration requires universities to re-engineer their business processes. While moving to the cloud reduces the need to support applications long term, it does require significant up-front investment in change management. For instance, cloud-based models change workflows and staff deployment as IT needs move away from daily maintenance in favor of more strategic roles to support an organization’s growth plans. Universities often struggle because they don’t account for this and don’t spend adequate time planning for the project’s change-management requirements.

Whatever the case, map the journey. Identify the phases in which you’ll roll out aspects of your cloud environment according to priorities. Start with small pilot projects. Learn from them and carry those lessons into forthcoming phases with an eye toward continuous improvement.

3. Seek modern cloud options
While the industry talks about cloud computing as the hot new thing, it has been around more than 20 years. In this second decade, we are entering a time when not all cloud services and solutions are on par. In fact, many are downright antiquated. You need a modern cloud platform underlying everything. The most modern clouds provide scalable, on-demand offerings that not only deliver new services but also incorporate and extend existing IT investments. Rather than rigidly forcing clients to settle for standard capabilities, these clouds are also supported by technologies that IT managers can tailor for each function, whether that’s academics, IT, administration, or research. And they avoid lock-in. Your data is your data, and you should be able to move it easily whenever you deem necessary.

Modern clouds embrace emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things, and chatbots, letting you become more efficient and engage employees and students alike.

4. Prioritize privacy
If you’re like most of us, you’ve undoubtedly received a flurry of emails lately from companies advising you about their privacy policies. This is happening for a few reasons, including the recent enactment of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe as well as the ongoing public relations nightmare confronting Facebook over the alleged sharing and mishandling of its subscriber data around the world.

These events underscore a growing pressure on public and private organizations to safeguard personally identifiable information (PII). Indeed, with a rising tide of cyberattacks threatening PII on an almost daily basis, 70 percent of consumers today say they are increasingly concerned about privacy.

As such, it’s imperative to embrace IT security technologies, mechanisms, and policies—at the start of any planning process—that will safeguard the PII of every administrator, educator, and student.

5. You are not late to the party, but you soon will be
There’s been plenty of debate about how many educational institutions have already shifted to the cloud, but even the most aggressive estimates suggest less than 30 percent have done so.

This means there is plenty of opportunity for visionary colleges and universities to use cloud technology to differentiate themselves and deliver personalized experiences for students. The time is now to capture industry and student mindshare, and institutions that continue to lag risk falling further behind and becoming less relevant within educational circles.

Cloud computing has evolved into a valuable tool for pragmatic modernization. More modern cloud-based services have also emerged to overcome the inflexibility and one-size-fits-all shortcomings of first-generation clouds.

With this next era of cloud computing, the key is to develop a strategic approach that maximizes the best of cloud and on-premise resources and maps a successful, long-term path to a modern campus. As with any major change, migration to the cloud doesn’t come without challenges. However, when implemented using a thoughtful and personalized approach, the potential for success is great.

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