Shelton Waggener, Internet2, Senior Vice President
How The Cloud Aids Higher Education
- Mobility, big data, and security are the driving forces behind higher education institutions’ move to the cloud because they are areas in which cloud apps and vendors excel and can help institutions make considerable improvements.
- Recognize that every institution is already in the cloud by way of their students’ cloud access. Therefore, cloud adoption allows institutions to gain useful insight into and control over that access.
“Students don’t think in terms of constrained environments. Just like they do in the real world, they need to be able to make decisions in real time, all the time.”
Those who are making the move to the cloud should treat the shift as a full transition from one technology stack to another, says Shelton Waggener, senior vice president of Internet2.“The difference from on-premises transitions (like mainframe to mini, client server to web server) is that the technology stack isn’t one that you build locally,” he says. “Cloud platforms simply move much faster than any previous technology transition. This migration is accelerating the pressure on chief information officers globally, across all industries, to evaluate their technical platform strategies. You simply cannot avoid being in the cloud, whether you want to or not.”
This is an excerpt from The Future of Higher Education. The eBook was generously sponsored by Ellucian.
