| | July-August 20178By Chris Harrison, CTO, Nova Southeastern UniversityCloud Strategy in Higher EducationTraditionally IT (Information Technology) organizations within the Education industry, and in particular in Higher Education, have been focused on hosting all educational platforms on-premises. This has been a traditional trend consistent with the nature of the educational industry.Not until recently, colleges and universities believed in the notion that by having physical control of the solutions and platforms within their institutions it would provide their academic stakeholders (students, faculty and staff) with an advantage. With increased financial pressure on all sectors of Higher-Ed (private/public and for profit/non-profit) to either reduce or maintain the cost of education through tuition and others, we’ve seen a direct and greater impact on IT and P&L by forcing the conversation of not only doing more with less, but how to position IT strategically within the institutions so as to become competitive and sustainable.One area that more and more colleges and universities are beginning to embrace and plan, is leveraging the Cloud and it services; thus freeing up resources and capital to be focused on more value-added and strategic initiatives aimed directly at improving the student’s entire lifecycle experience from lead to graduation and at every touchpoint of their academic experience. The reality is that by having all platforms within the institutions data centers provides no value-added. There are enormous amounts of cloud and world-class providers that provide a higher quality, availability and, at times, lower cost than an internal IT organization.In today’s world, the large majority of the software educational providers in the core areas of Student Information Systems, Learning Management Systems, Student Acquisition Systems and a slew of other areas including quality, proctoring, examination, research and analysis tools within the academic software umbrella have begun to provide cloud solutions to institutions. These are either SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) models. In addition to these three basic models, there are a few “hybrid” models offered as well. With the availability of Cloud offerings, universities and colleges are being pressured to take advantage of these “commoditized” solutions by migrating them from on-premises and into the cloud; hence releasing resources and capital that can then be leveraged more strategically. The larger software educational providers and business solutions, do already provide their customers with migration plans to ensure a smooth transition. One key challenging area is the “custom-build” solutions that are either legacy or have not been built with the cloud mindset. For these a proper migration plan and architecture (including API advantage. With increased financial pressure on all sectors of Higher-Ed (private/public and for profit/non-profit) to either reduce or maintain the cost of education through tuition and others, we’ve seen a direct and greater impact on IT and P&L by forcing the conversation of not only doing more with less, but how to position IT strategically within the institutions so as to become competitive and sustainable.One area that more and more colleges and universities are beginning to embrace and plan, is leveraging the Cloud and it services; thus freeing up resources and capital to be focused on more value-added and strategic initiatives aimed directly at improving lifecycle experience from lead to graduation and to institutions. These are either SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) models. In addition to these three basic models, there are a few “hybrid” models offered as well. With the availability of Cloud offerings, universities and colleges are being pressured to take advantage of these “commoditized” solutions by migrating them from on-premises and into the cloud; hence releasing resources and capital that can then be leveraged more strategically. The larger software educational providers and business solutions, do already provide their customers with migration plans to ensure a smooth transition. One key challenging area is the “custom-build” solutions that are either legacy or have not been built with the cloud mindset. Chris HarrisonIn My Opinion
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