Scalable Cloud Strategies: Values for Higher Education
A Q&A with Chris Wessells
Scalable cloud strategies can support a wide array of services, applications, and capabilities of great value to higher education. Unisys Higher Education Strategist Christopher Wessells, formerly vice provost and CIO at the University of San Diego, has consulted for several institutions on their cloud transformations. His insights range from data integration in cloud environments, to transformative cloud security, to cloud-based education innovation, to cloud infrastructure and strategies for future readiness. Here, Wessells examines some of the values scalable cloud strategies offer institutions.
Mary Grush: What's a sure sign that an institution should consider moving its business and/or learning systems to the cloud?
Chris Wessells: On a fundamental level, any institution that is still running enterprise applications, such as ERP systems or learning management systems in an on-campus data center needs to consider a more modern, security-centric, and cloud-enabled infrastructure. In my work with universities and colleges, it's become clear to me that a transition of the core enterprise systems to SaaS or to the leading public cloud environments offers much greater capabilities for driving improved services to students, faculty, staff, institutional leaders, and alumni.
Grush: What's a simple example of that, of beginning to leverage cloud capabilities for such big gains?
Wessells: There are several examples. One basic but powerful example would be the capability to establish an elastic compute environment around registration processes. That in and of itself becomes an automated process in the cloud. It's more productive than maintaining a capital infrastructure in a data center and scaling up and down for that… creating possible infrastructure over-provisioning, which you don't need to do. That's a perfect example of a cloud strategy that can benefit any institution. And the ROI will be easy to quantify.
Even if the institution only "lifts and shifts," leveraging the capabilities of a modern public cloud provider to deal with the elastic nature of workloads is a significant step forward.
Even if the institution only "lifts and shifts," leveraging the capabilities of a modern public cloud provider to deal with the elastic nature of workloads is a significant step forward.
Grush: So, even an institution just starting its cloud journey could soon begin to discover the wider values of scalable cloud services. And there are many — could we talk a bit about some of them?
Wessells: Sure! When you couple your initial cloud experience with things like data integration capabilities and data virtualization, you can save a tremendous amount of cost simply given the nature of the cloud. For example, one of the steps the California State University made to become "cloud-ready" was implementing Perforce-Delphix data virtualization, applied to 4 million-plus PeopleSoft records. That effort resulted in an improved security posture and data agility, and it rendered millions of dollars in cost savings in terms of storage for the CSU system. It helped create the foundation for the CSU's move to the cloud.
Grush: I'd like to hear an example of integration at scale. Could you tell me a little more about the CSUs? That huge system must be the best example of a cloud strategy at scale.
Wessells: That story really begins way back in the early 2000s, when the CSU made a bold decision to invest in PeopleSoft for all 23 universities in the system. Yet after two decades of using PeopleSoft, the demand to modernize the capabilities of the SIS, HR, Financials, and associated applications was only possible through a cloud-and-security transformation.