What is Sending Universities into a Cloud-based Ecosystem?
Posted by Alec Phillips on Thu, Sep 16, 2010 @ 11:27 AM
As a precursor to the beginning of another school year, Network World’s John Cox posted Back to School IT projects reshape campus life a few weeks back. This article looked at 6 major IT initiatives currently being seen at college campuses around the country. One that was of particular interest to us here at Sonian has to do with the increase in cloud deployments in higher ed.
Network World -- 8/20/10 -- In tandem with such virtualization is growing use of cloud-based services. Dartmouth has just adopted the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS), which are online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office and other Microsoft applications. The school chose Microsoft over Google's comparable product because it plans to integrate the on-campus Exchange Server with the cloud offering. Dartmouth is also evaluating cloud offerings via Amazon and Rackspace.
Brandeis this fall will complete the transition of its campus e-mail and calendar services to Google's online equivalents.
"Google can do it way better than Brandeis," Turner says. One key factor in Brandeis' decision: Google's excellent support for mobile users. "To keep up with them, we'd have to make sure we were always updating all our software," Turner says. "Just the new iPad puts us behind the eight-ball right away."
Dartmouth's Waite-Franzen says she expects more education software vendors to create cloud offerings. SunGard Higher Education, for example, announced earlier this year it will offer as a hosted service the federal methodology for calculating student financial aid eligibility base on the latest government rules.
This got us thinking: What drivers are sending universities into a cloud-based ecosystem?
- Cost savings - Cloud services present an enormous opportunity for schools to save on IT infrastructure. With the right strategy, schools that move to an off premise cloud-based infrastructure can significantly lower capital costs, maintenance costs, and IT personnel costs.
- System downtime - So much of today's coursework is digital. Textbooks that used to come with software on CDs now simply offer unique passwords that let you access online software, teachers assign work via email, class discussions are held via online forum, Facebook.com has replaced the physical facebook (I went to look for a picture of an actual, paper, binded school facebook that I could link to and the closest thing I could find was a "crumpled paper facebook icon"), and "the school email servers were down" is the new "the dog ate my homework." With so much of today's learning taking place online, when a school's server is down, the learning can come to a halt. Moving infrastructure to the cloud removes the burden of server maintenance off of an on-site IT staff and puts it in the hands of a much larger entity that can offer 99.99% SLA.
- Ease of use - with a cloud-based infrastructure, school IT staff can easily implement, monitor, and maintain systems from literally anywhere. Students and faculty as well are able to access documents and collaborate on projects from their dorms and homes easier than if they were working through an internal server system.
If you can think of other reasons for (or against) a cloud-based IT infrastructure for schools, send me an email or comment below!
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