How Universities Can Modernize Their IT Systems

The domain of education, like many other industries today, faces significant challenges to adapt and respond to market demands. New curriculum approaches are incorporated by the market while new platforms require applications, tools, and content. Data needs proper management and analysis to be used in an efficient and way in line with existing data analysis methods. On top of that, the industry looks at a huge demand for collaboration and interactivity, bringing IT to the forefront of what education will represent in the upcoming decade.

Let’s talk 2021

While many higher education institutions are increasingly taking measures to keep pace with disruptive technologies and the rapid changes in the job market, a large part of the industry remains on the backfoot as they are hindered by their legacy applications that limit agility and true innovation.  

So why should Universities modernize their legacy systems and move towards the cloud?

Just like in many other areas, the pandemic has increased the pace at which organizations across industries increase their IT efforts. This is no different for academic organizations and mostly comes out of necessity, coping with working from home, offering at-home-services for students, and providing those tools needed to re-open schools effectively.

While broadband and security are huge challenges at the forefront of what universities are dealing with, modernizing IT infrastructure will become more important than ever. As many state governments already had tremendous difficulties in keeping up with modern challenges due to lack of skills and efficient tools, there is no doubt that other industries will follow.

Modern problems require modern solutions

As new generations of students enroll in campus life, they bring with them their digital native way of thinking, resulting in new skills, needs and expectations both from them and the job market. Keeping up with this ongoing modernization is something that universities are bound to do, and not only in their curriculum.

Migrating their on-site legacy towards modern alternatives such as cloud platforms as well as modernizing application code that has been written as far back as several decades will be vital in order to keep up with 21st century IT infrastructure and the evolutions thereof.

These types of investment could prove costly, but also cost efficient on the long term, setting universities up for decades to come. How universities decide to undergo this transformation in their back- and front-end is up to them.

Modernization options: which one to choose?

Several options are available, so creating a strategy based on needs and objectives will be key.

• Rewriting applications on a cloud platform could bring great results, but can be expensive, both in time and resources.
• Trying to implement classic of the shelf software packages would certainly be a good short-term alternative, but will not always be perfectly adapted to the organization in question. Or why would they want to change their applications when they work just fine?
• Migrating applications to a cloud target platform, modernizing code in the meantime, with no impact on the functionality. Once again, strategy is key and being aware of all options could make or break any transformation project.

Astadia Europe (Anubex) hosted a webinar with Microsoft Azure and the Texas A&M University System to deep dive into universities modernization best strategies and seek to answer urgent questions on the future of IT infrastructure in this sector. You can watch the replay here.

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