Why we jumped forward in technology

Key takeaways

• In addition to moving technology maintenance to a vendor, the cloud offers many benefits
• Cloud vendors provide security expertise that institutions cannot afford
• The cloud also streamlines backup processes, enhancing business continuity

Peter Jones, Director of Institutional Effectiveness, California Institute of Integral Studies

We have an old legacy system that we've had for many years. And it was not serving us well. In our search for solutions, we determined that it was time to jump forward in technology with the cloud and software as a service. So we wanted to offload a lot of the technical part of information systems, but, at the same time, capture a lot of the innovation that has occurred in the industry.

Now we have these very large companies running clouds. And so, you can quickly go on and set up services. But you get tremendous benefits from that.

Number one—the security. They manage security for you. You can't hire those folks at a university. You can't afford them. But you also get backup benefit. I mean, they back up servers in the cloud. And that's something that is actually a very complicated and expensive process for a small team to do on a campus.

Then you get distribution of your data. You get the data distributed so that, if one set of servers goes down, you have a complete copy elsewhere. So you get all of that. And what that really gets translated into, if you will, is savings. It can be done much cheaper in the cloud.

We happened to be in this place where—we were at the end of a legacy environment. And we had this great opportunity to make a break with that and capture the advancements that had been happening while we had been in this last phase.