There are few environments where cloud computing makes more sense than in higher education. The combination of thousands of young people who’ve been raised in the Internet age, all needing access to a variety of information and applications, and all increasingly wanting to do so from anywhere on campus and off, adds up to an ideal setting for capitalizing fully on the cloud’s potential.
That’s certainly what they’re realizing at Windesheim, a 20,000-student university of applied sciences in The Netherlands that has been moving steadily from a client/server IT model toward one that emphasizes the cloud. “We have a goal that every application we use has to be online,” says Windesheim’s CIO and IT director, Rob Keemink.
The school started out slowly a few years ago, rolling out an Intranet, built on Microsoft Sharepoint, that functions more than anything as a clearing house for request forms. When any of the school’s 2,000 staff members need anything, from a new employee to software to classroom supplies, they use the forms to state their need, specify any known costs, and then track the progress of their request.
From there, it was on to a growing array of Web-based services. For example, Blackboard gives teachers and students around-the-clock access to class-related information ranging from assignment details to class cancellation notifications; an application called iExpense enables staff to file expense reports online; and another app, Educator, simplifies the distribution and increases the accuracy of posted grades.
The opening of a second campus in the fall of 2010 has given the school a convenient opportunity to further establish a cloud-friendly infrastructure. Keemink hopes to provide students on the new campus with web-based email accounts from Google or Microsoft, either of which offers much more storage than the school can within its current email environment. Doing so will greatly reduce the need for servers to support the new campus’ computing requirements. (Web-based email and data residing on Microsoft or Google servers is not an option for staff due to Dutch privacy regulations and the fact that emails and data containing personal data might pass through, or reside on, servers in other countries.)
Cloud computing also is allowing Windesheim to scale back on its existing IT hardware. Keemink says the school’s current server room, which is located on the original campus and houses 300 app servers and 40 TB of disk storage, will be consolidated over the next 5 to 10 years as more of the school’s computing resources shift to the cloud.
Keemink points out that one of the main drivers pushing the school aggressively toward the cloud is that it no longer makes sense to support today’s students with traditional IT architectures. “It’s completely normal for them to have their data, their information about school, at every moment, wherever they are,” he says.
Teachers are quickly moving that way, too, as they increasingly see the benefits of Web-based access to applications and services. But getting the school’s board to understand the new direction was a bit trickier.
Keemink says that when he first tried to explain cloud computing to board members, they had a hard time grasping it. For instance, he had set up a Wiki as a collaborative tool for managing campus planning over the next few years, but board members didn’t understand what a Wiki was. He provided them with access, and now they use the Wiki to discuss documents during meetings, rather than bringing hard copies with them. It’s helped convince them that cloud computing brings significant value to students, teachers, and the school’s IT operation.
In addition to that value, cloud computing has brought great change to Windesheim’s IT staff. The required skill set has been shifting to building applications, managing projects and overseeing cloud contracts rather than staffing help desks or watching over servers, networks and storage equipment. “We’re seeing another kind of staff that’s more highly educated,” says Keemink. “It’s another kind of work in IT now.”
It’s not just that: It’s a whole new way of running a business. Or, in this case, a school.