siliconindia | | April 20178EDUCATION ADOPTING LATEST TECHNOLOGIESBy Rama Dhuwaraha, AVC & CIO, University of North Texas SystemUNTS is governed by a Board of Regents appointed by the Governor of Texas and is the only Texas public university system headquartered in the vibrant North Texas region. Every year they award more than 9,000 degrees ­ including the largest number of master's and doctoral degrees in the region.The benefits of cloud computing for the Education industry can only be realized if we align our education and IT strategy. This alignment will help us improve outcomes in the quality of research and education. If cloud solutions are leveraged appropriately we can reduce cost, improve efficiency, and reduce operational complexity. IT Shared Services has been moving toward offering an On Premise Hybrid Cloud as a service to the UNT System campuses and organizations over the last year. A critical piece of that strategy is establishing a solid infrastructure foundation to replace our existing systems. This foundation facilitates more virtualization of workloads allowing more flexibility for applications, greater automation to enhance efficiency, and orchestration to support service provisioning within minutes. The automation/orchestration also creates a self-service platform for internal and external customers which speeds the deployment of many application services. We have also embraced the public cloud for solutions that are not core to our services. Moving workloads between the on premise cloud and public cloud is still a challenge we have not solved. Embracing an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud strategy is a must to remain competitive.Data landscaping is not optimized at Universities and Colleges as many of them use fragmented systems where data is ill defined and data governance is nonexistent. To complicate it further, many departments have chosen their own business analytics tools and methodologies which make data integration very difficult across the enterprise. In order to drive business value for educational institutions, we need good data governance and data quality. A comprehensive data warehousing strategy must be implemented to drive student success based on a data driven culture, and predictive analytics. Effective and proactive use of data can be achieved by using reliable reports and real time dashboards.Universities are innovation hubs where research is the lifeblood. We need a framework where innovations can be commercialized faster in order to foster growth. Campuses need to be thought of cities within cities. Current frameworks focus more on patent filing and not advanced commercialization. Virtual IN MY OPINIONCIOs must embrace virtualization, software defined networking, and cloud technology to deal with the onslaught of digital content and mobile devices
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