Colleges and universities have it tough these days, especially the smaller ones. Lower enrollments mean smaller endowments, and weaker revenue streams. Every dollar must be spent wisely. The current generation of incoming students were born digital and are tech savvy. Not only do students select their higher education options based on culture and fit, but available technology is important to them. They expect to use collaborative messaging and mobile applications as part of their college experience.
Many smaller schools are relying on older technology to run their student information and administrative systems. The legacy technology is expensive to maintain and complex to manage. IT operations spends lots of time and money just keeping up with the existing infrastructure. At a time where higher education institutions are struggling for funding, this puts enormous pressure on IT organizations to keep up with rolling out modern applications, such as mobile-enabled apps and location-based services.
In addition to the pressure to deliver next-generation applications and keeping the campus network robust enough to handle the extra capacity required by the students’, faculty’s, and staff members’ ubiquitous phone usage, IT organizations also have to deal with high availability and resilience compliance. Having a proper continuity plan can be expensive and challenging to support.
All these pressures and challenges may seem daunting, but there is a way to move your school forward both from an IT perspective as well as focusing on the mission of the school. The answer is managed services. Financially, managed services make sense, as you can change your IT consumption model from CapEx to OpEx. Budgeting can be predictable and less expensive than capital outlays. Managed services offer many compelling benefits for smaller colleges and universities.
First of all, enlisting the help of a managed services partner who is well versed in how educational data centers are run can be helpful. For instance, the partner can help augment staff. Trusting someone who is familiar with the critical applications and operational aspects enables your staff to focus on more strategic projects — such as delivering mobile platforms, or cloud applications. Alternatively, outsourcing the IT services as a whole — including the infrastructure can be a compelling financial argument. Leveraging cloud-based applications through a consumption-based cost model while reducing on-site data center server and storage requirements can save colleges money in the long run. Not to mention, you can achieve your high-availability/resiliency SLAs without the cost of redundant hardware and software on-site. The cost savings can be used to focus on furthering the college’s mission and enable leadership to focus on what’s important.
American Digital has deep expertise with student information and learning management systems used by higher education institutions. Our managed services team also understands the challenges smaller schools wrestle with daily as they try to attract and retain the students they want, while working with outdated technology. Outsourcing your day-to-day IT operations just might be what you need to jump start your institution’s technology evolution.
Interested in learning more? Give us a call: 847-637-4300