George Washington University Improves Network for Academic, Administrative and Research Uses

He says that means users will be protected from other users on the network.

“When we think about the university as a hotbed for Bring Your Own Device, we have a variety of purchasing options that happen where researchers, academics and administrators introduce devices that may be procured for specific uses within the university and introduced to our network,” Martin says. “Those atypical or surprise devices exponentially increase the amount of complexity on our infrastructure.”

Joel Dolisey, CTO of SolarWinds says complex networks like GW’s are common in higher education.

“With the advent of mobile devices, you see that campuses in general tend to be more wired compared to ten years ago,” he says. “You see an explosion of devices, whether they are owned by the school or by the students, teachers, etc. You have a mix of services that need to be handled differently.”

Dolisey says solutions like automated technologies and good relationships with IT management companies can help a network upgrade run efficiently.

“We are trying to help IT admin in all kinds of industries, and higher education is one of those areas where we’re trying to help them make their jobs easier,” he says. “When you think about the problems I’ve talked about … general network management tools are geared for helped those problems.”

Even though GW is not entirely finished with the network upgrade, Martin says SolarWinds will help them button up the project soon.

He says the partnership with SolarWinds taught his team valuable lessons, such as the importance of consistent communication.

“We can’t do it all at once,” Martin says. “We’re learning on the go and making changes to make each iteration of the migration better. We’re more than half way complete to moving to the distributive routing environment.”