Universities Say Cloud Services Make the Grade

The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and Rhode Island’s Bryant University are two schools that have recently invested in cloud services. UT Austin announced it will use Workday‘s (WDAY’s) Administrative Solution for Higher Education for human resources and financial services support, while Bryant University has selected NaviSite‘s NaviCloud Vault cloud storage platform for offsite data storage.

But Workday and NaviSite aren’t the only cloud services providers (CSPs) to support colleges and universities.

Several schools use Box to promote collaboration between faculty and students, including Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and University of Notre Dame. Also, TechCrunch points out Dropbox now has 275 million users worldwide and has encouraged students to sign up for its cloud services in the past.

Why did UT Austin and Bryant University choose their respective cloud services? Kevin Hegarty, vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) at UT Austin, said his school wanted a unified administrative cloud application that met the needs of its faculty, staff and students.

“Our university must be empowered with new capabilities that will enable us to better serve all employees and help our students achieve great success,” Hegarty said in a prepared statement.

Bryant University, on the other hand, selected NaviCloud Vault to better secure its data. According to a press release, Bryant University encourages its students to use smartphones and tablets in their classrooms to collaborate with each other and faculty. As a result, more Bryant University students are using mobile devices than ever before, and it was paramount for this university to invest in managed cloud services to support its growth.

“As with most organizations, we’re seeing an explosive growth in data,” Rich Siedzik, director of computer and telecommunications services at Bryant University, said in a prepared statement. “Our solution is now more digitized … We anticipate significant savings for our data storage and a significant reduction in the time it takes [to] access the data.”

More colleges and universities could adopt cloud services in the future. In CDW‘s (CDW’s) 2013 State of the Cloud Report of 1,242 IT professionals, researchers revealed 43 percent of participating colleges and universities were implementing or maintaining cloud services, and this figure could rise if more schools invest in cloud services.

“Educational institutions have a growing need for enterprise-grade storage given the rapid proliferation of data stemming from a multitude of devices and sources and an increased adoption of technology to transform the overall learning experience. In addition, they are also under increased pressure to deliver a more robust and resilient infrastructure that addresses their disaster recovery, business continuity, security and compliance goals,” Sumeet Sabharwal, group vice president and general manager at NaviSite, said in a prepared statement.