Management

Spring Is Here: Campus IT Teams Can Get to Work

EdTech offers advice for embarking on summer tech upgrades, from outdoor LANs to data center optimization and everything in between.

Ryan Petersen

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Ryan Petersen has worked in publishing for more than two decades, most of it spent
creating award-winning content and strategy for CDW’s family of tech magazine brands. As
editor-in-chief, he works with his team to develop compelling and useful industry-focused
stories to share with the technology world. Outside of work, Ryan enjoys spending time with
his children, traveling, online gaming, and following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs
baseball.

Summer is right around the corner, and while students are focused on summer school, internships and the beach, higher education IT teams are putting their plans into action and working on those much-needed upgrades and replacements.

To help support those initiatives, this issue of EdTech: Focus on Higher Education offers some advice and expertise on planning and optimizing campus enterprise networks and data centers, from information on new endpoint security solutions to getting started with software-defined storage. It also provides information about how colleges and universities such as Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., are incorporating hybrid cloud environments and tips for properly deploying an outdoor LAN.

If your focus is more on the classroom, discover how institutions such as the University of Maryland University College and Louisiana Delta Community College are bringing the world to their students with new networking strategies and unified communications tools — without the need for numerous IT team members.

“We have a small technical staff at our college,” Louisiana Delta’s Bruce Hemphill says, so the video solution had to be user-friendly. “We couldn’t be everywhere at the same time.”

What's Next for the Cloud?

As cloud computing continues to be top of mind for IT groups, our own Aletha Noonan shares her insights on CDW’s recent Cloud 401 Report, which reveals the thinking of 1,200 IT managers from a variety of industries on their cloud deployments or future plans for cloud-based resources. Some good news from the report: Each cloud migration gets easier. By and large, respondents noted that their initial cloud deployments may have taken an average of 14 weeks, but subsequent implementations took about 10 weeks. About half of those surveyed said they now complete typical implementations in six weeks or less.

Many things improve with time, it seems. Now that your IT team has some student-free time, make the most of it. We’re here to help.

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