The Real Value of the Cloud for Higher Education

“Far too often, though, institutions underestimate the number of integrations that they will bring to the cloud,” said Armstrong during the event. “A university may anticipate 80 integrations, of which 20 may be critical, only to discover later that there are at least another 120 integrations lurking somewhere else. In many cases, they are replications or near replications of the same thing.

“In the last wave of implementations across the industry, integrations were often the last consideration, and often underestimated. This is where adopting standards pays off. Institutions should expect a cloud or technology vendor supporting higher education to understand those standards and hopefully have some integration packs ready to go.”

Faster Access to Innovation

There is a tremendous amount of innovation taking place among cloud customers precisely because the cloud necessitates the adoptions of industry standards.

By adopting industry standards around areas that should be standard (e.g., security, business continuity, deploying web services, ways of interfacing) institutions free up a lot more bandwidth and resources to build on top of those standards and share them. “That’s when the innovation cycle really accelerates,” added Armstrong.

“Instead of every institution coding applications and deploying tools differently, everyone shares and eventually creates best practices based on a common framework. The ability to build, customize, and share knowledge with peers is the essence of an open community and what is truly unique about higher education.”

Adding and Uniting Campuses in the Cloud

When panelist Casey Green of the Campus Computing project asked the conference room full of attendees how many were part of multi-campus systems, more than half the audience raised their hands. “The cloud can unify a widely distributed university system for the benefit of the system and its students,” says Green. “Instead of students being tied to one institution within the system, they can become citizens of the entire university system, with the ability to take courses at any campus location through the cloud to achieve their academic goals, while the university captures all academic records across the system through one instance of the application.”

Gaining Greater Insight

Cloud-based SIS and ERP solutions are generating huge amounts of data across systems that institutions can use to develop behavioral analytics and retention strategies. Some cloud vendors now offer integrated analytics, such as Microsoft Power BI, to identify patterns for successful engagement with students and improve outcomes.

The industry analyst Eduventures notes that CIOs are struggling to recruit and train the staff needed to implement and support these complex systems. And the CIOs and senior IT officers who participated in the fall 2016 Campus Computing Survey identified “hiring/retaining IT personnel” as their top campus IT priority over the next two to three years. Cloud-based ERP and SIS solutions can include the predictive tools and support an institution needs to gain greater insight into student performance, without the institution having to make additional investments in staff or expertise.

Conclusion

While adoption of cloud-based SIS and ERP solutions has been slow due to the perceived risks, more institutions are making the leap to transform their operations in response to reduced budgets and a rapidly evolving higher education landscape.

Data from the fall 2016 Campus Computing Survey confirm that migration to the cloud for key ERP applications is not a matter of if, but when for most campus officials, with more than 80 percent of surveyed CIOs and senior campus IT officers agreeing or strongly agreeing that “cloud computing will play an increasingly important role in our campus ERP strategy.”

Whether it’s for point solutions such as LMS or for core applications, institutions are directing more resources toward the cloud as a business imperative, to drive innovation, extensibility, and insights that lead to student and operational success. This whitepaper, based on panelist discussions during Campus Management’s corporate presentation at EDUCAUSE 2016, also explored the critical considerations that institutions need to make when vetting cloud-based SIS and ERP vendors, including:

What is the cloud provider’s level of higher education expertise and experience, and is the provider focused on higher education or multiple industries?
Has the cloud provider demonstrated an ability to adapt and evolve with an institution’s needs?
Does the cloud provider’s security environment meet current industry standards and my institution’s standards?
What kind of service level agreements does the cloud provider offer? Do the SLAs also cover the application layer and its data?
Will the cloud provider deliver releases on my terms without disrupting operations?
Does the cloud provider have integration packs ready to go?
Have we made an accurate inventory of integrations that we want to migrate to the cloud?
Will we be able to negotiate with a cloud provider based on our usage patterns to gain elasticity at a much lower cost?