Has your school moved to the cloud yet? If not, you are missing out. Cloud computing offers several benefits like high availability, auto-scaling, pay-as-you-go pricing, rapid deployment, continuous integration — all on a world-class IT infrastructure you don’t need to manage. Moving your higher ed institution to the cloud helps your school move the focus away from IT infrastructure and managing servers to focus on the student experience. In this article, we’ll provide you five tips for successful cloud implementation at your college, plus how you can prepare your team to make the switch.
Why the cloud?
Cloud computing offers schools the ability to serve more campus needs with less IT infrastructure and associated resources to manage. Further, the cloud gives you the ability to scale automatically and reach the highest levels of availability by leveraging availability zones around the world. With the cloud, you only pay for what you use, so IT resources auto-scale down during slow times and auto-scale up during peak levels of traffic and usage. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud store your production workloads off-site so you don’t need to manage servers. For those required to keep certain data on-premise, these providers offer hybrid solutions so you can run your core workloads on the cloud and keep student data on-premises. For higher ed, the cloud opens up several growth opportunities for schools seeking to optimize the student journey and efficiency of their campuses. A recent whitepaper by AWS reveals that 37% of institutions around the world said that “adopting cloud services” is one of the top-three IT projects over the next 18 months.Employing cloud services effectively in higher ed can deliver benefits in several ways. It can do the following: speed up academic and administrative innovation, drive the use of smarter and more secure systems, gather stronger data insight, empower IT to refocus on supporting business effectiveness, optimize costs, and transform the student journey. Further, schools can leverage cloud architecture to deliver higher levels of performance and speed across their distributed applications. Schools that still manage their IT infrastructure on-premises are ripe for cloud migration. The cloud is a viable solution for schools looking to benefit the most from budget resources as they implement IT services. Sounds great, right? So what’s holding more colleges back from making the move to cloud? The greatest obstacle for higher ed today is determining which parts of their workloads are a good fit for the cloud and which parts need to stay on-premises (if any). A combination of a hybrid cloud infrastructure, standardized APIs and strong can help overcome this challenge, but it requires a concerted effort and willingness to adapt from university staff during the initial migration.
