Today’s higher education institutions are at the crossroads of technological transition.
In the midst of public health concerns, declining enrollments, and escalating demands for services, institutions are introducing new applications to engage students and transform administrative efficiency. Digital services are empowering students, faculty, and staff like never before.
At the same time, many educational functions are still supported by legacy applications and physical data centers, and institutions need to be able to leverage these investments for as long as possible. Campus IT staff are faced with the complexities of parallel infrastructure stacks, hybrid and/or multi-cloud architectures, disparate IT operations models, and untenable cyberattack surface proliferation. Plus, there’s the added investment overhead, cross-campus collaboration, and manpower required to make even minor technology changes.
The reality is that educational institutions need a modernization continuum that allows them to migrate existing applications to the cloud incrementally. Today’s institution requires a dynamic technology foundation for managing and securing all types of applications—legacy, cloud-native, and container applications—to meet student and staff needs effectively.
Modernize Applications for a Better Experience
At the heart of every institution are the applications, data, and technology workloads that must be managed with maximum agility. In fact, 83% of colleges and universities are investing in or exploring digital transformation. Yet, many institutions are not only faced with complex and inflexible legacy environments, but the organizational structure itself restricts innovation. There needs to be a culture shift to allow for iterative collaboration between cross-functional teams, which accelerates the delivery of high-quality software.
VMware offers the building blocks and proven technical expertise to help your institution easily adapt to changing requirements, especially when modernizing applications to enhance the user experience for students, faculty, and staff. Our experts understand how to put the right processes into place for cultural transformation.
Using Kubernetes as a common platform, VMware lets institutions leverage all the benefits of going “cloud native” without refactoring applications, reskilling, or starting from scratch. By seamlessly integrating new methodologies like containerization and orchestration into your IT infrastructure, you can accelerate software delivery to improve support services—across data center, cloud, and edge environments.
Expand Services in a Multi-Cloud World
Traditionally, application development and delivery within institutions was a siloed affair, involving complicated handoffs and cross-team coordination. The modern paradigm brings together those who build apps with those who run them, and those who secure them. With DevSecOps orchestration, institutions now have a common language, common tools, and a common security methodology for rapidly delivering applications in a diverse multi-cloud world.
And the cloud readiness is not a moment too soon. ScholarBuys and VMware can help institutions accelerate the adoption of cloud applications and new ways of learning, ensuring that students can get the most from their learning experiences—whether on campus or remote.
Elevate Employee and Student Experiences with Digital Workspaces
Today’s institutions are under increasing pressure to use the latest technologies to attract and retain students. Online learning is a way of life for the next generation. Meanwhile, faculty and staff also need to work safely and securely from any location. Across the board, users have higher expectations about their online experiences, as everyone’s daily lives grow more virtual. Platforms like digital workspaces and virtual infrastructure can help campus IT staff keep up with all the new demands.
With ScholarBuys and VMware, institutions can consolidate management of IT assets and user identities—while empowering students and staff with self-service tools. Users can access critical resources on-demand, with authentication rules based on their roles, geographical location, and network connection. VMware frees campus IT staff from disparate management tools and time-consuming manual operations. From a single point of control, IT can view devices, monitor their patch levels, and automatically enforce security policies to ensure seamless operations.
Optimize Connectivity for a Remote-Access World
As more student services and school administration goes online, institutions need more fine-grained network control. Campus IT staff need to be able to stand up and scale new networks, provision applications, and enable new services with robust security. According to recent EDUCAUSE surveys, information security and privacy continue to be the top IT issues for higher education.
Leveraging the skills and solutions your teams already have, ScholarBuys and VMware create a critical consistency in how workloads and data are managed—all through a single platform optimized for multiple destinations at once. When unexpected or short-term needs drive demand for added capacity, software-defined WAN services enable your institution to quickly scale and adapt automatically. ScholarBuys and VMware provide the seamless, extensible way to deliver applications to a workforce in motion, while securing resources on the evolving organizational edge.
Colleges and universities need to protect sensitive data not just in administrative systems, but also in the systems that support online learning and academic research. To strengthen your institution’s security posture, it’s time for zero-trust policies and controls that work across on-premises, cloud, and endpoint devices. ScholarBuys and VMware provides built-in security that automatically embeds protection everywhere—rather than “bolting on” point security products.
