cloud-IT-change

Best practices for IT working on Cloud Nine


Once lagging behind in adoption of, and migration to, cloud services, higher education is pulling ahead of other industries—here’s how.

cloud-IT-technologyThere are many grim realities facing CIOs and IT department heads at colleges and universities—but when confronted with these modern-day problems, many savvy leaders are positioning their campuses on Cloud Nine.

When Meritalk, a public-private partnership focused on government IT, released their report “Cloud Campus: The Software-Defined College,” the consensus amongst the 152 IT professionals from private and public institutions surveyed was that “[c]ampus IT requirements are growing. Budgets are not.” Alongside the squeezing of budgets to meet the increasing complexity of IT requirements the report also found that, due to redundant, non-centralized IT systems, U.S. campuses were wasting money to the tune of $3.8 Billion annually.

Where other industries recognized outsourcing their infrastructure and services to the cloud as a way to mitigate similar issues shared with universities and colleges, the pace of migration to the cloud in the higher education space was slow.

Navisite, Inc— a Time-Warner Cable owned company that provides enterprise-class, cloud-enabled managed hosting and application services to different industries, including higher education institutes–, through partnerships with consortiums, such as the Ocean State Higher Education Economic Development and Administrative Network (OSHEAN) ; universities, like Bryant University in Rhode Island; and companies, like Nvidia and VMWare, –has been the tip of the spear in facilitating cloud adoption in the higher education space.

As Sumeet Sabharwal, vice president and general manager of Navisite explains, “Higher ed has been a somewhat slow adopter, but one where there is tremendous momentum building up. If you see where some of initial adoption has taken place, it’s taken place with some of the companies that are known to be leading on the technology front and on the adoption of newer technology…financial service, media/entertainment, high-tech…but I think the education sector, which has historically lagged, is one that is playing catch-up, but playing catch-up really fast.”

Build value with layering

Resource-strapped IT departments have been trying to do more with less, and Navisite recommends demonstrating added value for the same cost by layering compute, storage, and desktop cloud services into fiber, and other broadband infrastructure that OSHEAN provides to Higher Ed Institutions. The added value comes not just from lowering expenditures on IT infrastructure, it can also be derived from freeing up IT departments from maintaining and operating that infrastructure thus allowing them to build better services for the institutions they serve.

“It’s that paradigm shift,” Sabharwal notes. “In the net grand scheme, you’re not spending any more money than you were, but you really freed up your IT staff now to really focus a lot on the front-end of how to transform the business, how to unlock value, how to bring in e-learning…extending the whole learning paradigm.”

(Next page: Daas to BYOD; HIPPA)

Synergize DaaS to your BYOD policy

According to an internal survey, Navisite’s customers have primarily focused on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud solutions with Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is slowly rising in importance as workforces become more mobile and global.

However, colleges and universities have been leading the charge on DaaS implementation and developing interesting ways of finding synergies between DaaS and a robust BYOD policy.

“What’s interesting, and where higher education kind of leads, is on the DaaS side,” says Sabharwal. ”There are some very meaningful use-cases that apply in the higher ed settings that resonate quite a bit, be it the kiosk and lab environments…in common areas…where DaaS is a great fit.”

For example, with software and retention

One of the examples which Sabharwal used to show how DaaS and BYOD policies can be married effectively in a campus environment is in software licensing management and retention. For example, a professor on loan to a university arrives with their own laptop, and they need to install software to teach a course. When it comes time for the professor to leave, there is no easy way to re-acquire the license for the software, and the university runs the risk of having to purchase another potentially expensive license to replace what it lost. Additionally, what if the laptop brought in by the professor is not able to run the software because of OS incompatibility?

With DaaS, a desktop session loaded with the licensed software would be served to the professor on any device regardless of the OS. When it is no longer needed, the desktop session can be destroyed, and with it the fear of having to replace a lost license or equipment.

These desktops can be created for a multitude of purposes presenting different solutions for different requirements; students would have access to different desktop environments as befitting their disciplines, and professors, staff, public users, etc., would be served with desktops based off of requirements they had as well.

Remember HIPPA for the cloud

One unintended benefit of higher education’s slower migration to the cloud is that, after embarrassing security breaches related to other cloud services,providing hardened security solutions for the higher education space has increased for companies like Navisite.

“We have universities that we are working with today that are choosing to enforce some of the same HIPPA compliance policies [as in the healthcare sector] to protect their student data…to protect their professor data…proactively and ensure those appropriate controls are in place,” says Sabharwal.

Those controls, Sabharwal explains, follow traditional perimeter security models of proactively monitoring traffic scanning for attempted intrusions and attacks, but also move beyond the perimeter model. “The world today is not about perimeter security; it’s fast-shifting to micro-segmentation and being able to provide security in isolation at a workload level. We are able to create virtual segmentation of those workloads by using concepts like software-defined networking to really enhance the security overall so that one workload that is running in one particular virtualized environment has no access to a second workload that may be running virtually beside it.” Data, network, workload segmentation– everything running in isolation so that a breach in one area will not compromise the integrity of the system.

Now that the initial frenzy of cloud adoption is over, there is a chance for a more realistic and practical analysis of all the cloud has to offer colleges and universities. Like the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, the slow and steady approach of higher education has pulled it ahead of the pack, making the future of cloud service adoption and migration for other campus IT departments seem more akin to Cloud Nine than Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Doug Walker is an editorial freelancer for eCampus News.

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