As higher education institutions continue to discover the benefits of hosting data in the cloud, these environments are becoming increasingly complex. According to the 2024 CDW Cloud Computing Research Report, 88% of higher education institutions have moved more than a quarter of their applications into the cloud. But overall, 79% of higher education respondents said the benefits of the cloud have met or surpassed their expectations, and 94% of respondents said they can very or somewhat effectively manage their cloud environments. So, how are they doing it?
At the 2024 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, IT leaders from Northwestern University and Texas A&M University spoke about their cloud journeys and the tools they’ve employed to streamline workflows.
Northwestern University has more than 200 cloud accounts across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, according to Matthew Rich, cloud systems engineering manager for the university. Research, administrative work, and teaching and learning are all done in the cloud, across platforms.
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Texas A&M has a similar story, according to Joseph Rafferty, program manager for the university. The largest university in the country, Texas A&M recently consolidated its cloud environment from more than 500 accounts to approximately 355, Rafferty said.
Centralized Cloud Management Helps Ease Visibility Concerns
With so many public cloud accounts to manage, visibility and monitoring can be a challenge, especially with short-staffed IT departments. The Northwestern team, for example, was looking for a way to understand what was happening across the university’s entire cloud state, Rich said.
At Texas A&M, the limited staff needed help keeping up with cloud customers, according to Rafferty.
“We did have a major shift in the type of customers that were that were coming to us for accounts,” he said. “They were cloud-curious, but not necessarily cloud-content yet. We were very small team. We did not have resources to build everything alongside these customers, so we started looking for tools we could put in place to protect us so we didn’t have to watch over all these accounts.”
Both universities opted to use a third-party cloud visibility and management tool to track and monitor cloud usage.
DISCOVER: Read the full 2024 CDW Cloud Computing Research Report.
Having skilled in-house staff is key for 69% of higher education respondents to the CDW survey, but 50% say their institutions lack cloud skills on staff. Respondents named cloud management platforms and third-party management services as important for maintenance.
End-User Involvement Helps Curb Cloud Spending
According to Rich, members of the Northwestern IT team regularly meet with cloud account owners to check in and make sure they’re getting the most out of their cloud resources. They also go over costs in these meetings.
“One of the first things we do is take a look at their budget for the fiscal year and where their current spend is trending,” he said. “Often, we go a step further and take a look at their spend reports, and it's not uncommon to hear folks either identify services that they’re spending more on than they expect to or potentially have other savings opportunities that may be available to them that they just were not previously aware of.”
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Most higher education respondents to the CDW survey (85%) say they are either very or somewhat confident that they can track the costs of their cloud systems. Thirty-eight percent have seen total cost of ownership benefits from the public cloud.
Extending cloud visibility to users and not just the IT team allows them to make better decisions about their usage, which can drive costs down.
“An important part is to get the data in front of them in an unintrusive way,” Rafferty said. “It leads to more awareness on a report that something is or is not happening in the way that they expect, or they get curious to start doing their own reports.” This helps users take accountability for their cloud spending, he said, and reduces the number of times the IT teams must ask end users about budget concerns.
Overall, introducing tools that can help manage and monitor cloud resources can give back the IT team valuable time to focus on other projects.
“It’s allowed us to remain small,” Rafferty said. “Most of the operations are handled by another team now, and that's enabled engineering to really focus on the quality of the resources that are in the cloud.”
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