Cross-campus collaboration helps IT peers solve problems together, says Cornell University's Sarah Christen.
Cornell is a highly distributed IT organization, with 250 central employees and about 500 IT staffers in individual colleges and departments. Christen created the campuswide group so that everyone could collaborate, discuss issues (for example, how to refactor applications to the cloud) and create how-to documents, which they share over a wiki.
“We solve problems together rather than reinvent the wheel every time,” she says.
As for training, Cornell offered a 100-day online training that included hands-on projects.
Indiana University recently offered training to its cloud security working group (comprising staff in networking, security, operations and policy) on how to properly configure and manage workloads in Google Cloud Platform. Flynn plans to offer the same for AWS and Azure.
Because classes involve only a small number of people, Flynn plans to obtain subscriptions to online training, and use a library model where people can check out licenses for three weeks at a time to get training in preparation for certification tests. If the university wants to provide hands-on training, they can pool the licenses to hold training sessions, he says.
Tips and Best Practices: Closing the Cloud Skills Gap
Successful cloud transformations first require a shift in mindset, away from the traditional IT inclination to lock things down and maintain control, says VMware’s Munro.
Campus users, including students, want to innovate and create on the latest technologies, and that includes cloud services. So IT staff must adapt and be flexible, while addressing privacy and security concerns, he says.