Higher Education All-In on Cloud-First

Posted on by Tim Boltz

Is digital transformation in higher education possible without the cloud? Not likely. When that transformation is viewed as a journey, not a destination, the essential role of cloud-based resources as enabling and empowering infrastructure comes sharply into focus. Institutional performance, operational efficiencies, student success — the primary goals of digital transformation in higher education today — are only possible with the agility and scalability of cloud-based computing and resources.

Without a clear strategy in place, digital transformation and cloud migration can start to look like a game of whack-a-mole. As teams weigh where cloud solutions will take them next, understanding and articulating the need to include data-intensive computing, security, reporting, and analysis is imperative. That’s all the more true as students increasingly demand a level of personalization and engagement that can only be delivered through a robust analytics and data infrastructure. Download the guide to learn how to grow beyond today’s analytics programs and to mature them for endemic management and strategy.

Cloud Budgets Keep Growing

“‘As higher education institutions continue to pivot toward continuous modernization practices, the SaaS segment of the cloud is likely to see the most investment,’ noted Damien Eversmann, Chief Architect for Education at Red Hat. ‘Cloud resources provide the agility and flexibility needed to support the culture of change that continuous modernization demands. As long as security practices are properly maintained, cloud adoption is one of the best tools for academic institutions to stay ahead of the curve.’ All cloud categories are expected to see growth in 2023, according to Gartner, with the most significant anticipated growth in Cloud Management and Security Services and Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS).”

Read more insights from Damien Eversmann, Chief Architect for Education at Red Hat.

Accelerate Agility and Integrate Data

“Today, higher education IT professionals refer to “the new normal” when discussing the many modes of learning, research, and other day-to-day hybrid work now possible thanks to cloud computing. The monumental movement and general acceptance of the cloud within higher education happened nearly overnight, after years of hesitance and reluctance on the part of higher ed leaders who sought greater on-site control over data and operations. That reluctance transformed to trust as cloud-based operations proved their mettle, and institutions by and large today embrace a new way of working through the ongoing and continuous change of digital transformation. “That’s probably the biggest change — that change is the constant,” said Bill Greeves, an industry advisor for SAP who supports the organization’s education customers. As a former CIO and deputy county manager for Wake County, N.C., Greeves saw firsthand the overnight transformation to cloud-based workloads to keep government and citizen services up and running at the onset and throughout the pandemic.”

Read more insights from Bill Greeves, Industry Advisor for SAP.

Essentials for Navigating Cloud Implementations

“While the mission of higher education has never changed, the means of fulfilling that mission continue to swiftly evolve, particularly as a result of cloud computing technology and the migration of workloads, applications, storage — pretty much everything — to the cloud. Higher education research, in particular, enjoys many benefits from the cloud, including rapid provisioning of data and applications, or abstraction, which ensures non-technical users can readily deploy cloud resources and quickly get back to the real task at hand: research. Cloud is at the heart of institutions’ ongoing march to digital transformation, but that’s not all: Prompted by the pandemic, many colleges and universities have also embraced the rapid adoption of cloud capabilities in support of remote work and collaboration.”

Read more insights from Hunter Ely, Security Strategist at Palo Alto Networks, and Mathew Lamb, Manager, Pre-Sales Cloud Native Solutions at Palo Alto Networks.

Download the full report for more insights from these from these higher ed Cloud leaders as well as additional perspectives and industry research.

Adapting with Evolving K–12 Challenges

Posted on by Tim Boltz

The last few years brought a level of technological complexity to K–12 schools that teachers, students, and administrators are still grappling with. Succeeding in those efforts requires embracing the fluid nature of an increasingly complex world. Educational leaders learned a number of lessons during the pandemic, and they have already begun to apply them to build a better future for their students and their school districts. These lessons are familiar to IT leaders in government and industry, and they include the need for stronger cybersecurity, robust data analytics for better decision-making, and a more holistic approach to IT management. As K–12 leaders absorb the lessons of the past few years, they are transforming their approach to technology and building educational systems that can thrive at a time when change is the only constant. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in K–12 education.

Gleaning Powerful Insights From Financial Data

“Today’s technology advances are directly supporting teachers and students, but school performance also benefits from improvements to back-office operations. Better budget management in particular can have a meaningful impact on a wide range of goals. The latest technologies enable schools to automate routine activities, such as processing and paying invoices. An automated system can more quickly, efficiently, and accurately capture information than humans can, but even more importantly, automation opens up the ability to adopt machine learning, which can identify important patterns and trends in spending. By freeing the finance team from mundane tasks and providing richer insights into how budgets are being used, schools can plan more effectively and ensure their money is being spent wisely.”

Read more insights from Jim McClurkin, Senior Director of Public Sector at SAP Concur.

Collaborating Across Districts for Cyber Resiliency

“Taking it a step further, when schools share information with one another about the problems they are seeing and the attacks they are facing, they can crowdsource solutions and thereby boost cyber resiliency across districts and across the K–12 sector as a whole. That approach also offers a way for schools to enhance security even when funding for IT systems and staff is less than robust. Rather than leaving under-resourced districts to tackle cybersecurity in isolation, the K12 Security Information Exchange’s report concludes that ‘school districts should put a premium on sharing threat intelligence, sharing best practices, developing model policies, pursuing mutually beneficial risk mitigation solutions that can be deployed at scale, and educating state and federal policymakers about K–12 cybersecurity challenges and potential solutions.’ Pooling resources among districts can have a powerful impact, and schools can also benefit from tapping into federal security standards, many of which offer well defined processes for responding to specific scenarios and situations.”

Read more insights from Brandon Shopp, Group Vice President for Product Management at SolarWinds.

Innovative Tools for Protecting Students Online

“Cyberbullying in particular affects a wide range of students. The StopBullying.gov website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that ‘cyberbullying includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else. It can include sharing personal or private information about someone else causing embarrassment or humiliation.’ According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, middle school students report the highest levels of cyberbullying, followed by high school students and then primary school students. In a 2020 study conducted by Justin Patchin and Sameer Hinduja of the Cyberbullying Research Center, 49.8% of tweens (9 to 12 years old) said they experienced bullying at school, and 14.5% said they experienced bullying online. For nearly 70% of the latter group, cyberbullying made them feel bad about themselves. It also had a negative effect on their friendships, physical health, and schoolwork.”

Read more insights from Colin McLean, Product Specialist at Saasyan.

Download the full Innovation in Education report for more insights from these K-12 thought leaders and additional industry research from THE Journal.

Adapting with Evolving Higher Education Challenges

Posted on by Tim Boltz

For many colleges and universities, the global pandemic served as a wake-up call for more innovative teaching models. They quickly discovered that remote learning is no longer an occasional tool for specific situations. Instead, a mix of in-person and online platforms has become an imperative to ensure digital equity and educational excellence. Even before the pandemic, researchers cited the importance of course design and the need for a pedagogical shift to ensure success in blended learning. Now, many believe that as faculty and students become more proficient with the technology and adapt to online education, outcomes will improve. Close collaboration between faculty and technology teams is also important as both groups adapt to new teaching models. To ensure clear communication, many institutions will need to invest in cameras, microphones and speaker systems, and many classes may benefit from a technology assistant who keeps track of the messages students post and resolves any technical issues. Incorporating such modern tools alongside institutions’ legacy solutions presents a diverse set of challenges. In the Campus Technology survey, staying within budget constraints (44%) was the top challenge cited by respondents, and it goes hand in hand with choosing the right products, services and solutions (41%). Technological challenges also include getting legacy and modern solutions to work together (36%), sharing data between legacy and modern systems (27%), and managing and securing a diverse IT ecosystem (25%). Learn how, by investing in further modernization, your institution can boost its ability to meet current demands while maintaining flexibility to respond to the unknown challenges ahead in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Education report.

Embracing the New Normal in Higher Education

“By allowing students of different backgrounds, perspectives, and ages to interact with one another, a hybrid or HyFlex approach enriches the classroom experience. That flexibility should be used as a recruitment tool: By offering a range of options for in-person and online learning, institutions can dramatically expand their reach nationally and even internationally. The success of the new normal in education hinges on being able to measure student engagement. In a face-to-face classroom, instructors can note whether students are making eye contact and how many of them are raising their hands or asking questions. At Class Technologies, we enable instructors to bring that same emphasis on student outcomes into an online format.”

Read more insights from Class Technology’s Senior Director of Advocacy and Community, Dr. Kim Oppelt.

Using Data Analytics to Enhance Student Services

“In addition to automation, artificial intelligence can transform the way colleges and universities provide services to their students. When higher education leaders understand the value and availability of AI, they can create a vision for its adoption. Then data analysts can use AI to accelerate the institution’s delivery of student services and improve its ability to predict outcomes early, enabling educators to address trouble spots early or invest in key initiatives. With AI, analysts can focus at the level of the entire student population, a certain demographic profile or the individual student. For example, AI can integrate with a campus learning system to identify students who may be at risk of dropping out. To be successful, AI must be part of an institution’s overall data management strategy, and the IT infrastructure should be built or updated to support that strategy.”

Read more insights from Cloudera’s Senior Solutions Engineer, Brian Hagan.

A Cybersecurity Mesh Speeds Digital Transformation

“Research firm Gartner defines a cybersecurity mesh as a “flexible, composable architecture that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services” — in other words, it enables institutions to leverage a suite of complementary tools. A mesh architecture creates efficiency and greater coverage across the digital surface, while enabling the IT team to understand what’s happening on its network and better prepare for the next cybersecurity event. This concept can also reduce the number of point security solutions and products. To make the business case for taking that approach, focus on demonstrating return on investment. A mesh architecture reduces costs because it consolidates tools and services while simplifying digital transitions. The mesh components will enable standardized training and raise the bar on knowledge transfer across the distributed IT environment.”

Read more insights from Fortinet’s Field CISO for Education, Bob Turner.

Why Student Experience Equals Student Success

“Student needs are so individualized that a single, one-size-fits-all approach to services is ineffective. Institutions need systems that can constantly learn from students as they’re navigating their experience on campus and then take student-specific action. Qualtrics’ experience management platform enables students to share feedback in a host of different ways and then crucially, pairs that data with internal systems to help institutions gain a holistic view of those students. Campus leaders can listen, understand and act through a platform that gathers information and converts it into real-time insights for decision-makers. In addition, the Qualtrics platform uses artificial intelligence to help schools understand what friction points exist in the student journey and then helps to automate actions, such as connecting students with the right resources, at scale. By giving the right people the right information at the right time, AI enables institutions to intervene at the moments that matter most. It also helps decision-makers measure the impact of those actions.”

Read more insights from Qualtrics’ Vice President Higher Education Strategy, Joshua Sine.

Pivoting to Continuous Modernization in Higher Education

“Continuous modernization involves making small changes and regularly deploying those changes under a methodology called continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). Users try out new features, and developers get immediate validation and testing throughout the entire process, which results in targeted and ongoing improvements. Another key element is automation. When rote tasks such as spinning up virtual machines, configuring networks or resolving users’ help tickets are automated, IT administrators can focus on more complex activities, such as improving processes or incorporating new technologies. In addition, containerization makes it easy to migrate applications and workloads back and forth from on-premises systems to the cloud as needed.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Chief Architect for Education and the North America Public Sector, Damien Eversmann.

Using the Power of Data to Support Collaboration

“Data analysis can help institutions gain a fuller understanding of their cybersecurity posture. For example, it can enable risk-based alerting, so staffers are not overwhelmed with security alerts that aren’t important. In addition, many institutions are merging their development, security and operations cycles in a methodology called DevSecOps. That collaborative approach ensures that security is an integral element of IT systems rather than an afterthought. Collaboration also results in deeper insights. When institutions can access and analyze student experience and outcomes, they have a much clearer picture of what they need to do from a strategy and planning perspective to enhance academic programs and student services.”

Read more insights from Splunk’s Strategic Advisor, Frank Myers, and Business Development Manager, Elizabeth Thompson.

A Data-Informed Approach to Recruiting and Retaining Faculty

“UT Austin has a strong commitment to nominating faculty for major awards across racial and gender lines. However, we wanted to pinpoint any gaps in the nomination process to make sure we retain talented faculty members by recognizing a diversity of research. We chose to partner with Tableau because the company offers a user-friendly process for developing self-service dashboards. In this case, an awards analysis dashboard helps us quickly identify under-awarded faculty in each department and drill down into race/ethnicity and gender information. As a result, we have achieved better equity in the awards nomination process and improved our faculty recruitment and retention efforts.”

Read more insights from the University of Texas at Austin’s Chief Data Officer and Executive Director of Institutional Reporting, Research and Information Systems, Shiva Jaganathan.

Creating a Single Source of Data Truth

“The ability to make those kinds of informed decisions hinges on robust data sharing. Unfortunately, many institutions still lack consistency in data access and management. And when data exists in silos, there is no single source of truth. Breaking down silos to give end users the power to do their own research is crucial, and that culture change starts at the top. Leaders must drive the demand for universal access to data so that everyone can be confident in the data they’re using and the decisions they’re making. At Tableau, our mission is to help people see and understand data. We continually enhance our product to ensure that decision-makers at all levels have access to the data and insights they need.”

Read more insights from Tableau’s Regional Vice President of Education and Nonprofit Sales, Cassidy Macias, and Vice President of U.S. Education Enterprise Sales, Adam Ingram-Eiser.

Discovering the Endless Possibilities of Automation

“From recruitment through graduation and beyond, automation can play a crucial role in ensuring that students have the experience the college or university wants them to have. Automation can help students succeed, and after they graduate, automation can be used to stay in touch — for example, by congratulating them on a new job when their LinkedIn profile changes and encouraging them to give back to the university. In the past couple of years, a mental health crisis has arisen in higher education, and many students withdrew from institutions or struggled to keep up with their studies. Tackling the issue should be a top priority in higher education because the crisis will continue for at least a few more years as people become accustomed to going back to campuses and in-person learning. Automated services can help institutions check in with students to see how they’re doing and connect them with mental health resources if necessary.”

Read more insights from UiPath’s Global State, Local and Regional Government Industry Lead, Dan Horan.

A More Immersive Experience for Students and Staff

“Zoom was a market leader in higher education even before the pandemic because our tools are affordable and easy to use. We have built a unified communications platform on top of our popular videoconferencing technology and, for the past two years, have focused on creating a superior on-campus experience by integrating communication across all operating systems and expanding capabilities via cloud telephony with Zoom Phone. For example, among many amazing features, using the Zoom application on a smartphone gives users the ability to have Zoom Phone voicemail messages transcribed and sent to their e-mail. In addition, while most people are familiar with the chat function that’s enabled during a Zoom meeting, we have a separate, robust Zoom Chat collaboration tool built into our unified communications stack. It allows users to create communication channels for particular projects or teams and conduct one-on-one or group chats.”

Read more insights from Zoom’s Global Education Marketing Lead, Johann Zimmern.

Download the full Innovation in Education report for more insights from these IT modernization thought leaders and for additional industry research from Campus Technology.

IT Modernization for Campus Re-entry

Posted on by Tim Boltz

Many colleges and universities are poised to emerge from the pandemic stronger than they went in. In large part, they have used the last year to accelerate their adoption of online education where it makes sense, keeping the physical classroom time dedicated to experiential forms of learning. A theme among these institutions is the need to understand what the IT infrastructure can support and how well it’s holding up as institutional demands ebb and flow. A Campus Technology “pulse survey” among IT leaders and professionals found that while the impact of remote learning and work made their jobs harder rather than easier (by 11 percentage points), the outcomes have been worth the effort. Four times as many participants agreed than disagreed that their organization’s response to the pandemic was improving the way they deliver services to students, faculty and staff. Learn how your institution can continue to adapt IT infrastructure in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Education report.

Mastering the Art and Design of Remote Work

“On a traditional physical computing device like a workstation, PC or laptop, a GPU typically performs all the capture, encode and rendering for power complex tasks, such as 3D apps and video. NVIDIA virtual GPU technology virtualizes GPUs installed in the data center to be shared across multiple virtual machines or users. The rendering and encoding are done on the virtual machines’ host server rather than on a physical endpoint device. The basic idea is to share the GPU functionality with multiple users and give them the same experience as they’d have if they were running applications on dedicated workstations. The advantage is this: Instead of having a one-to-one connection — one GPU per computer — you get one-to-many. The physical GPU runs in a server and the vGPU software dynamically slices it up to allow multiple users to access its power (up to as many as 64 users per GPU).”

Read more insights from NVIDIA’s Senior Product Specialist, Ismet Nesicolaci.

Easier Identity and Access Management

“Single sign-on (SSO) has long been a boon for making the authentication process more efficient. Yet, because of their distributed structures, most institutions haven’t gone all the way with SSO. It may be that program control for the identity and access management (IAM) layer is maintained for some applications by central IT and for others by a given college or department. IT may lack the staff to keep up with the programming requirements and/or the sudden influx of new demand. Or the college or university may be working with other institutions, each operating autonomously even as they need to share people, programs and research data. Then there are the security aspects. While SSO makes for a centralized approach to application access, that access also poses a big risk: If a cybercriminal gets unauthorized access through the SSO, they will be able to access all of the associated applications. Embedding multi-factor authentication (MFA) into the login process adds a needed level of protection to authentication processes to keep accounts truly secure. But students are still stuck with multiple logins, and institutions have to try to keep up with a sprawling and complicated IAM system.”

Read more insights from Okta’s Senior CIAM Developer Specialist, Ryan Schaller.

Evolving with IT to Support Research

“While institutions have expressed continuing concern about wobbling tuition and ancillary dollars, one source of revenue remains healthy for higher education: COVID-19 research funded by federal and state programs. The full measure, from community colleges to Research 1s, are at the forefront of projects to develop vaccines; uncover the sources of coronavirus and its evolving replication patterns; create new initiatives for public health response; understand the impact of the virus on various populations; study the physical and mental health and learning effects of prolonged quarantine; and explore numerous other facets.. However, the heightened attention on campus research comes with a continuing challenge: how to keep up with IT infrastructure needs, typically assembled once the grant funding arrives. Since many of these recent grants are shortterm, turnaround time can be tight. In many cases, research teams are going from near-zero infrastructure to running as quickly as possible — and not just serving applications to users, but storing, processing and sharing astronomical amounts of data.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Chief Architect for Higher Education for the North America Public Sector, Damien Eversmann.

Your Starting Point for IT Optimization

“The university IT shop doesn’t typically head to Best Buy when it’s time to update infrastructure. Acquisitions have to go through internal planning and approval, budgeting and ordering — and it all takes time. Having visibility into usage trends enables the IT department to better plan, thereby preventing gaps in performance and operations and opening up ample time to line up the funding needed. Best-of-breed monitoring takes that a step further, pulling in information from outside sources, so the IT crew doesn’t have to wonder. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, for example, links up with the relevant hardware and software to notify you when a vendor has put an end-of-support notice out. If Cisco has issued an end-of-of life message for a given switch, it serves as an early indicator for you to help plan timing of replacement.”

Read more insights from SolarWinds’ Vice President of Product Strategy for Security for Compliance and Tools, Brandon Shopp.

Building the Virtualized Student Union

“The IT organization has been at the heart of successful pivoting as remote teaching and learning have dominated. As a result, now that campuses are starting to return to normalcy, administration will rely on IT to continue enabling the work of enhancing the student experience. That’s especially true if, as many experts predict, hybrid or blended learning will forevermore be part of the modernized college experience. Integration is a big part of the solution. Forget about forcing students to figure out the dozens of different apps and websites they need to fully partake of college. IT needs to integrate the learning management platform, digital content, student support services, health and wellness, esports, collaboration, campus calendar and student information — enfolding them into a virtual student union. This idea goes beyond the student portal, which has been around for a long time. What’s new is the idea of marrying systems that may be PC-based, on-premise-based and cloud-based into a single hub and then wrapping that in a blanket of security that’s transparent to the user. That becomes a game-changer for the student experience.”

Read more insights from VMware’s SLED Strategist, Herb Thompson; VP of State, Local, and Education, Doug Harvey; and Senior National Director for SLED Business Development, John Punzak.

Accelerating Student Success with AI

“As growth in undergraduate credential earning has come to a standstill over the last year, colleges and universities are seeking new ways to draw in the right candidates while also holding onto the students they have by bolstering student success efforts. Numerous institutions of higher education are finding success in strategic aspects of the academic lifecycle by embedding the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. There are several areas where Google sees the potential for “quick wins” in student success initiatives: optimized enrollment and admission, such as automating the activities of credit transfer analysis, document analysis and personalized course planning; virtual assistance, for delivering 24/7 online tutoring and support in multiple languages answering common questions about required courses, financial aid and other topical subjects; and student engagement, like tracking engagement and predicting which students are at risk, to maximize retention.”

Read more insights from Google Cloud’s Cloud Strategic Business Executive for Higher Education and Research, Jesus Trujillo Gomez.

A Conversation with Jen Leasure

“As everything went online and was done with technology, institutions needed to invest in new solutions to support their researchers, their faculty, their students, their administration, in conducting their business — and with limited budgets. We know that everyone’s been having particular budget constraints, and they’re looking to maximize the benefits of these types of programs and their discounts. This type of program has been especially important during COVID. And remote and hybrid learning isn’t going away, as we know. It’s difficult to foresee a world where hybrid becomes an option instead of a requirement. Folks don’t like options taken away once they’re there. And so, the investment in these types of solutions is going to continue to support future directions. Cloud access especially has become important for institutions to support their students. That’s one area where we have seen a lot of growth in the last year.”

Read more insights from The Quilt’s President and CEO, Jen Leasure.

Download the full Innovation in Education report for more insights from these thought leaders and additional industry research from Campus Technology.

Locking Down Information Management Security on Campus

Posted on by Tim Boltz

According to one report, ransomware attacks against higher education doubled in 2020 compared to 2019, with an average ransom demand of $447,000. Traditionally, criminals tended to be opportunists; they’d strike at random and hope to get lucky. Now they’ve organized into highly sophisticated networks and cartels that will target any entity of substance they consider a viable target. Higher ed fits the profile, but some institutions are better positioned to withstand cybersecurity attacks than others. A combination of zero-trust and defense-in-depth allows these schools to defend against malware and ransomware. Ultimately, the job of the cybersecurity professional in higher ed is to “plan for the worst day,” as one cybersecurity expert recently noted during a Campus Technology leadership summit. But how can agencies overcome these obstacles to adapt to an increasingly targeted and threatening cybersecurity landscape? Learn how your institution can safeguard against threats, overcome evolving technical demands, and more in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Education report.

Gaining Total Visibility

“We can no longer piece together a set of disparate tools to solve acute security or compliance issues. Really, the only way forward is to use a mix of integrated security technologies that deliver, first, a view into traffic and, second, a flexible enforcement model that relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify attacks. The solution starts and ends with visibility. The goal is to understand how data flows through the network, cloud and endpoints so that IT can provide a consistent security view no matter how services are being used. It’s important to understand how your users are tapping those services and to surface those things that traditional tools can’t see. As one example, we have a service called Xpanse, which will take an outside-in view of the network and start to build relationships, looking at how endpoints are interacting with other endpoints that are outside of the network, contributing to the building of a map showing how the institution is connected to the rest of the world.”

Read more insights from Palo Alto Networks’ Security Strategist, Hunter Ely.

A Unifying Viewpoint for Security

“Automation of the easy security work — known threats, known responses, malware detection, cleanup — addresses both problems, and everybody wins. The campus gains better operational success. And when humans don’t have to intervene with the ordinary, they’re free to do more interesting work. They grow in their positions, because they’re not just clicking buttons all day. Automation is especially important in an era of remote status quo and zero-trust. IT has to assume that there’s a high probability of any authentication request being nefarious. And that means being able to look at data in context: Is this person at a higher risk? Is the laptop or smartphone compromised? Should we let them on the network today? Have we scanned this device in the last three days? Then let’s not allow them access to this HR data. If they get their machine scanned, then they can come back and try again. While higher ed has long been predicated on allowing open access, now that can only happen when it’s the appropriate thing to do. Users have to be classified — student, researcher, staffer — and access has to be controlled. When everything looks normal, they get unfettered access. But when their machine or account is compromised, the access should be denied. Easier said than done, right?”

Read more insights from Splunk’s Minister of Magic, Jesse Trucks.

AI and the Carrot Approach to Zero-Trust Network Access

“Some 20 years ago, I was outfitted with a BlackBerry device, and it was the first time I could get e-mail from the road. But it wasn’t the built-in keyboard that made that device so special. It was really the fact that my organization’s IT department trusted the BlackBerry security model so deeply, I could use my device to access sensitive corporate information. BlackBerry’s mission hasn’t changed. But now, that security emphasis is used to secure some 500 million endpoints — including cars — produced by various companies. That’s why higher education has rediscovered BlackBerry. The university IT organization trusts the company to keep devices secure, whether they’re owned by the institution or individual people — students, staff or faculty. And now, without having to use a college-owned device that navigates through the college-owned firewall, users can once again be liberated, just like we were two decades ago, when we first got a taste of the freedom allowed by mobility.”

Read more insights from BlackBerry’s Director of Sales, Chris Russo.

Protecting the Campus from the Outside In

“Is it any wonder threats are on the rise? As the number of system and data breaches rack up in higher education, security experts have adopted a defense-in-depth stance. Putting multiple defensive measures in place begins with a baseline security posture that wants to understand everything coming into and going out of the network, preferably in real time. The tricky part is achieving that level of visibility and response when the threats could originate from any one of the many thousands of devices accessing institutional resources. One route is deploying domain name system (DNS) security. Let’s think about DNS for a moment. It may be decades-old but it’s still heavily relied upon; without it, the entire network is shut off from the internet. Regardless of their location, endpoints require DNS to connect to any application, service or data source. And so does malware, which uses DNS at multiple stages of an attack. That’s why DNS is a marvelous transport system for malfeasance. Traditional security mechanisms don’t police it well because there’s so much of it — millions of DNS queries a day for the typical university.”

Read more insights from Infoblox’s Director and General Manager for U.S. Education, Rufus Coleman.

Uncovering the Hidden Costs of Cloud Security

“While the public cloud has been a boon for higher education on many fronts, it has also become a conundrum, especially when it comes to storage for the purposes of security and safety. As the needs add up, so does the expense. The first not-so-hidden cost is the baseline cost of data storage. As an example, think about the capacity required to sustain video recordings of people entering and exiting buildings on campus. A network of 100 cameras, each capturing 8 frames per second with a modest resolution of 720 pixels, operating continuously at just medium quality, would require 200 terabytes of capacity. On Amazon Web Services, the cost for storing 200 TB on S3 would be about $56,000 for the year. If the institution were to upgrade to newer cameras capturing 15 frames per second at 1080 pixels, generating five times as much data — a full petabyte — the expense would quintuple, to about $289,000. Microsoft Azure would be slightly under that ($262,000) and Google Cloud a bit more ($327,000). Second, there is the additional hidden cost of the traditional route those cloud storage providers follow for transactions related to the data. They’ve all predicated the value of their services on fractional pricing (a tenth of a penny for this, a couple of pennies for that) for seemingly insignificant activities, such as egress or API requests.”

Read more insights from Wasabi’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, David Boland.

Staying on Top of Cybersecurity: A Conversation with Two University CISOs

“In March 2020, I was feeling more comfortable in terms of what our border looked like and the things that we were protecting our constituents from. Then the pandemic happened and people started grabbing devices off of their desks and old laptops out of storage closets and dragging them home to put on home networks — and who knows how they were being secured, if they were being secured at all. I thought I had a fairly good plan in place and tools deployed across my infrastructure to protect us, but that was all out the window. And so, over the last year we’ve been looking at services and products we can deploy that will protect our users as well at home as we could when they were on campus. And there’s nothing like having a community of your peers to have those conversations with and to learn what they’re doing, how long it took them to get there, what bumps they ran into along the way and ultimately, how they were able to steer around those. That’s significantly beneficial to all of us, and that is a huge value of participating with Internet2 overall and through the NET+ program for specific cloud and security solutions.”

Read more insights from Tom Dugas, CISO for Duquesne University, and Rick Haugerud, CISO for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Community-Powered Problem-Solving

“We facilitate the community engaging with each other to identify best practices. For example, let’s say there’s a particular challenge that a campus is trying to figure out. They may go into a community call, where campuses can ask their peers: How do you solve this problem? And then they can get immediate feedback. Or there are many ways institutions collaborate digitally, including e-mail lists, Slack channels and wikis, where they can engage with peers to identify best practices. That is all part of the NET+ program, where advisory boards and community events help to foster more optimal service offerings and benchmarking. And a program manager like myself is engaged with and supports these types of discussions. After a number of campuses have verbalized similar challenges, we’ll realize maybe there’s something there that we need to write up, to share broadly with the community, where they can look at a frequently asked questions repository and find the answers to their questions. And that’s even faster than going and asking their peers.”

Read more insights from Internet2’s Program Manager for Security and Identity, Nick Lewis.

Download the full Innovation in Education report for more insights from these cybersecurity thought leaders and additional industry research from CampusTech.

Safe & Sound Schools: Cybersecurity in K-12

Posted on by Tim Boltz

A year ago, IT professionals in K-12 school systems became heroes to their communities when their skills and resourcefulness turned on remote learning for nearly all. But while IT teams were enabling teaching and learning to continue uninterrupted in spite of everything else going on in the world, they were also seeing their systems beset by relentless attacks. More school districts than ever have been victimized by ransomware, data breaches, and other forms of digital malfeasance. While there’s no way to guarantee your schools will avoid all cyber incidents, the preemptive moves you take will make digital and online activities ever safer for your district users. Learn how your institution can adapt to this new environment in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Education report.

Closing in on Cybersecurity Stability

“Traditionally, for good reasons, the conversation in K-12 has been focused on education. The priority for spending has been steered toward academics — getting more support and training for teachers and trying to control the classroom size, for example. Technology, and especially cybersecurity, was a scheduled expense, up there with predictable plumbing problems and textbook replacement, but contained within the IT organization. However, IT — and especially cybersecurity — has now become a strategic element for education. Parents, superintendents, board members and executives within administration have realized that keeping data and systems safe can have a district-wide impact. Experience a data breach or a ransomware event and you’ll suffer damages that strike your budget as well as your reputation: Families will leave your schools to go to the district next door that didn’t have a break-in. That means it has become something that should be part of all decision-making.”

Read more insights from Palo Alto Networks’ Cybersecurity Strategist, Fadi Fadhil.

Getting Away from the Ransomware Triple Threat

“Even though it’s now a simple matter to go online and learn how to launch a cyber-attack and buy the tools to do so for just a few dollars, ransomware has become a more complicated process, involving triple extortion. Originally, the idea was that the bad guys would get into your computer system, encrypt your data and tell you that in order to get the data back, you’d have to pay x bitcoins. That was pretty direct; you either paid the money and hoped they’d give you your data or you had backups, because a good backup policy would prevent an attack from imposing any lasting damage. So the criminals revised their approach. They turned around and said, ‘OK, we’ve encrypted your data. Pay this amount to get it back. And by the way, we also stole your data. If you want to prevent this data from being made public, you will pay the same amount of ransom, and this is the deadline.’”

Read more insights from HPE’s Distinguished Technologist in Cybersecurity, James Morrison.

The Essential Cybersecurity Service You’ve Never Heard Of

“The cybersecurity threat to K-12 educational institutions has been consistently growing since 2018. Unfortunately, for many schools, efforts to protect against cyber-attacks have not seen similar growth. K-12 public schools became the number one target for ransomware attacks across all public sectors in 2020. Meanwhile, less than a quarter of school districts have anyone dedicated to network security, according to the latest CoSN leadership report. And even institutions with dedicated network security staff may struggle with a lack of funding to dedicate to cybersecurity measures. This poses a challenge for schools that cannot build cybersecurity defenses that match the sophistication of the malicious actors intent on attacking their data-rich networks. Fortunately, cybersecurity help is available, and at no cost. Recognizing that schools, along with other state, local, tribal and territorial government agencies, rarely have the resources they need for cybersecurity, the Center for Internet Security, an international nonprofit, offers essential cybersecurity services through the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC).”

Read more insights from the Center for Internet Security’s (CIS) Senior VP of Operations and Security Services, Josh Moulin.

Greatness Awaits: Dump the Paperwork

“Envision this scenario: Requests for payment are sent in via online interface or digitized en masse through a designated service center. The data is vetted to make sure vendors are approved and expenses fall within the expected range or amount. The documentation is immediately tagged for the proper workflow, being approved at each level through a mobile app or computer application. Approvers can be added or removed from the workflow list as staffing or delegation needs change. Those who sit on approvals too long can be notified that the clock is running. Likewise, managers can be alerted when people on their team try to shove payments through without adequate controls or documentation in place. As a result, the right invoices are paid on time, without incurring penalties or losing out on possible rebates offered by the vendors. Any physical space dedicated to holding onto paper documentation can be dedicated to other purposes. On the expense side, schools can eliminate adult arts-and-crafts.”

Read more insights from SAP Concur’s Public Sector Senior Director, Jim McClurkin.

Virtual is Here to Stay, so Make It Better

“With the return to the physical classroom, you might think schools should tuck away their Zoom licenses for the next time an emergency strikes. But that would be short-sighted. Educators have seen how technology can play a role in delivering learning options for students who can’t attend in person. Now that K-12 administrators are reimagining and redesigning education, school districts would be foolish not to learn from their pandemic experiences. Their big lesson? Schools need virtual options. They need them for students who, because of physical, emotional or mental disabilities, can’t be in the classroom; who have dropped out just shy of a few credits and really want to earn that diploma; who are working to support their families; who are taking care of younger siblings; or who want to participate in dual enrollment and can’t get the unique classes they need through their own schools.”

Read more insights from Class Technologies’ VP of K-12 Strategy, Elfreda Massie.

Start with the End(point) in Mind

“While the concept of zero trust serves as a useful framework for understanding the goal of posting a guard at every entry and maintaining clear lines of authorization and authentication, getting it done is another matter. Somebody has to do the work of implementing endpoint management and security. Consider the challenge of mobile endpoint patching. IT churns through cycles continuously applying long lists of patches, mitigating risks for which there may be no exploit and that may not be in line for attack. According to a recent Ivanti report, “Patch Management Challenges,” 71% of IT and security professionals find patching to be overly complex and time-consuming. And the patching efforts may only address district-owned devices along with the small share of end users with their own devices who are willing to go through the patch process. What about everybody and everything else? The key is knowing what patches are crucial and being able to prioritize patch decisions that are going to provide comthe greatest security. The patch management approach needs to apply threat intelligence and risk assessment. Then it needs to be enabled on all devices — district-owned or not — without the process relying on interaction from users.”

Read more insights from Ivanti’s Public Sector CTO, Bill Harrod.

How to Tame the Cloud with One Call

“K-12 professionals are continually trying to keep their heads above water. They’re drowning in paperwork, processes, regulations and general bureaucracy. And they just need relief. If you’ve got 100 different contracts, every time you touch those contracts to manage them, support them, make amendments, check that they meet state and federal compliance guidelines, and more, it increases the total cost of ownership for every one of those cloud products and services. E&I helps you reduce this work, so that you can spend more time and energy in what you love to do, which is helping students learn.”

Read more insights from E&I Cooperative Services’ Vice President of Technology, Keith Fowlkes.

Download the full Innovation in Education report for more insights from these cybersecurity thought leaders and additional K-12 industry research from THE Journal.

Gaining Insight: Data Use for Campus Success

Posted on by Tim Boltz

A Campus Technology survey among readers found that while almost every college and university considered the use of data critical to institutional survival (84%), a minority of respondents believe their schools are very mature in applying data for practical uses. For example, while half of colleges (50%) have identified indicators of student success and use them regularly for decision-making, less than a third report that users can quickly and easily get the information they need (28%); have robust, secure or user-friendly tools for supporting data collection (29%); or have data experts available to guide users through their data needs (28%). In spite of the decades-long emphasis on adopting data to make better decisions, few institutions have exhibited progress towards their goals. What schools need is to have a better grasp of user experiences, which takes many forms. The practice of “data diving” on campus can have a lot of amazing outcomes. More students will show up and stick around; users’ experiences will be memorable in positive ways; employees will feel more job satisfaction, giving them pause when other opportunities arise; and innovation won’t be rushed by external forces (a.k.a. COVID-19) but introduced regularly as the normal order of operations, in response to what data is telling you. Learn how your institution can address these issues in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Education report.

The Absolutely Essential Higher Ed Superpower

“Never has education been more reliant on technology and the IT organization. As a result, colleges and universities are much more at risk from cybersecurity vulnerabilities today than ever before. At the same time, as technology dependence has grown, staffing and budget haven’t, which means IT solutions for educational institutions truly need to do more with the same or, in some cases, less than they’ve historically had. The pressure is immense. If a student can’t access an application or a resource, if a faculty member can’t get onto web conferencing, if a staffer can’t send e-mail, the institution will fail in its missions: educating students, making research discoveries, and doing everything in its power to secure the future of the world. With so much at stake, the one superpower IT teams in the education sector need to develop above all others is X-ray vision. Gaining visibility into what goes on inside your systems lets you become proactive, allowing you to see exactly where to target your time and attention and quickly troubleshoot problems for speedier response. Unless you were born on Krypton, the best way to achieve this level of visibility is to capitalize on tools that deliver the same capabilities.”

Read more insights from SolarWinds’ Group Vice President of Product Management, Brandon Shopp.

Why the Student Experience Matters (and What You Can Do About It)

“If a project is served by a point product, a program needs a platform. And I consider a platform to manage the student experience to be as vital to the higher ed technology stack as the SIS, the LMS, and the CRM. This is the missing link that will drive the metrics you care most about. Getting rigorous at a student-specific level about the experiences each is having is the only way to take actions to make them better — at both a campus level and at an individual level. While the three other systems provide some insight into the student experience via the operational data they generate, they mostly offer lagging indicators. They can tell you that someone hasn’t been in class for three consecutive sessions, isn’t completing assignments, or is in danger of being put on academic probation. But they won’t tell you how the student is feeling. If they’re actually engaged in teaching and learning. If your school doesn’t understand why a student is acting a certain way, it’s not addressing the root problem.”

Read more insights from Qualtrics’ Global Industry Leader in Education, Omar Garriott.

It’s Time to Re-imagine Your Front Door

“Gen Z and Gen Alpha users go online expecting constantly updated content. This doesn’t mean you need to cater to a TikTok or Instagram audience; but it’s worth asking, what if this campus website were TikTok? How would that change the way you think about site and content design? Maybe you employ more video because it can be super engaging. Maybe you share more of the experience on campus — classrooms, mock lectures, the humor found in everyday activities and interactions among students. Universities could consider emphasizing all of the different programs and services on offer. Take a page from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and others that surface multiple suggested offerings they have for you to watch that match to your interest. What would the school’s website be like if you used Netflix as the model? How would you organize the content and would it be on the homepage or a couple of layers down? How would you steer people through?”

Read more Acquia insights from Mediacurrent’s Creative Strategy Director for Product, Elliott Mower.

Seeking a Modern Search Experience

“Why shouldn’t the same search power let the IT organization gain visibility into the operations of its infrastructure? The idea is to observe the entire ecosystem by peering into logs, metrics, traces and more. That would enable the IT staffer to identify what’s running well or poorly, whether server or workstation, application or website. When something goes awry, he or she would be better positioned to resolve issues more quickly and proactively, thereby ensuring better digital experiences for users. Security information and event management (SIEM) has become a valued tool in security operation centers. The idea is to gain insights into the security state of the institution by monitoring data traffic, identifying anomalies and alerting IT for corrective action. What’s needed is a search technology outfitted with machine learning-driven detection rules for threat hunting and security analytics that are aligned to standards, such as a MITRE ATT&CK framework. Then IT can look specifically at what’s happening from a security perspective: Is it a lateral movement? Is it data exfiltration? Is it related to command and control? The faster the visibility, the faster the remediation.”

Read more insights from Elastic’s Senior Lead Solutions Architect, Jared Pane.

When Live Virtual Learning Really Works

“As you assess the caliber of the virtual learning tools your instructors are armed with, make sure they provide the functionality that facilitates a more memorable learning experience. That’s how you can play a role in helping students get and retain more from their courses.

For example, make sure there’s a level of content consistency across sections being taught by different people. You do that by using a platform where the entire presentation with all interactive tools (slides, video, audio, chat threads and exercises) can be stored in a shared system with assigned editing privileges. Also, give your instructors “backstage” controls that will help them monitor the presentation as it unfolds, so that they can understand what the students are viewing. Choose a platform that includes an engagement dashboard, to allow instructors to shift session operations in real time if engagement begins to lag. Essential tools would also include a speaker notes area and a chat, specifically to permit behind-the-scenes collaboration among presenters and moderators. Of course, integration with existing learning management systems and authoring programs is essential. So is security compliance that ensures the data generated before and during class remains private and encrypted and the sessions themselves can’t be breached by unauthorized people.”

Read more insights from Adobe Connect’s Senior Manager of Product Marketing, Vaishali Sangtani.

The Long Wait: Why It’s Time for Higher Ed to Embrace Automation

“What’s unique about education from any other kind of organization is that the typical institution has central IT, of course, but also instructional IT and research IT. If I’m in central IT and I’m standing up an HR application, my goal is to put that system in place with the expectation that it will run forevermore. IT’s job is to keep it running. But in instructional IT, I may be standing up a classroom environment that is only going to last a semester or a lab that’s going to last a couple of weeks. Then I need to tear it down and stand up a brand new one the next time that class or lab is offered. In research IT, I’ll need to spin up hundreds or thousands of nodes to process data for astronomical photography, chemical analysis or whatever the research problem is. When the processing is done and the results are generated, I stop it and scale it all back down again. There’s a temporary nature to so much of what education encompasses and the many systems it relies on. And that’s where automation can really make a big difference.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Chief Architect for Education in the North America Public Sector, Daniel Eversmann.

Partnering for Smarter and More Efficient Purchasing

“On the IT front, we’re getting more calls from procurement offices for solutions to support virtual learning in general and specifically, cloud storage and cybersecurity. Air filtration, another category where a pandemic uptick makes sense, isn’t traditional HVAC. These days, facilities operations are investing in more sophisticated “smart” systems that provide remote monitoring and operations, essential for settings where staff are squeezed for time and remote work is just as probable as on-campus work. Finally, there’s furniture. Because of how students will be interacting with one another, institutions are looking for innovative ways to position learners with physical distancing in mind within the classroom and in common areas. They want furniture that can easily be moved and assembled. They also want pieces with accessibility to power, for those environments where there may not be an electrical outlet on the floor or the wall. Vendors are coming up with creative applications for batteries associated with furniture and workstations.”

Read more insights from OMNIA Partners’ Vice President of Education, Alton Campbell.

Download the full Innovation in Education report for more insights from these data thought leaders and additional higher education industry research from Campus Tech.