Enterprise Cloud Adoption Strategies in Higher Education

transcript

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015

Lige Hensley, CTO - Ivy Tech Community College

Robert Carozzoni Lead Enterprise Cloud Strategist, Cornell University

Sarah Christen, Cloudification Services, Cornell University

Redshift, Big Data and Predictive Modeling

Lige Hensley, CTO - Ivy Tech Community College

Who we are• 866,000 active users• Students around the globe• 138 buildings• 24,000 PCs• 2,000 wireless access points• Over 100,000 network nodes• 3,000 tablet devices• 2,600 routers & switches• 60,000 course sections a year• 23,000,000 emails daily• 24/7/365 operations

• 10TB data downloaded from Internet daily• 10,000 smart phones supported• 700 TB of server data• 7,000 VOIP phones• 1,100 servers• 1,200 software applications• Generate over 100,000,000 rows of data

per day• IT staff of 165

Our challenge…• Existing reporting environment inadequate

for our size • Business need to better understand our

data• Improve student success rates• Very limited budget

What we wanted• Flexibility to handle our myriad of data

sources and business needs• Scalability to meet our growing demands• Performance to match our need for quick

answers to data questions

What we found• Worked with various “big data” vendors to

find an affordable solution• All “solutions” started at 7-figures and went

up• Nothing we found met our requirements

What we did• Adopted Redshift & Pentaho as our solution• Data feeds from numerous internal

systems, in near real-time in some cases• Keep all transactions, not just snapshots• Allow connections from other tools such as

Tableau, SPSS and Mathematica

What we can do now• Deliver data to users quickly, timely and on

any device• Analyze data between transactions• Run machine learning tools against our

data for predictive modeling and reporting

How it helps• Using historical data and pattern recognition

identify students who need assistance far earlier than ever before

• Analysis can be run as early as 2 weeks into term and maintain accuracy

• Accuracy of prediction models have ranged from 62% two years ago to 81% currently

Other benefits• Allows for quicker identification of

fraudulent registrations• Dramatically cheaper than the alternatives• Pattern analysis identifies poorly designed

course materials

Cornell University

Our Journey To The Cloud

Bob CarozzoniEnterprise Cloud Strategist

Which of these are officially part of Cornell’s mission statement?

❏Research❏Education❏Outreach❏Information

TechnologyX

IT STRATEGY Rebalance IT spend:● less non-mission aligned● more directly mission aligned

Cloud as Opportunity!

Cloud Risks!

Cornell Cloud Advisory ServiceA competency center for cloud

adoption

FOUR YEARS OF AGGRESSIVE CLOUD ADOPTION

Was it really that easy?

Understanding the needs of key stakeholders

IT Leadership in the “Post Enterprise World”?

CENTRAL IT

Administrative IT Staff

End-userBusiness

CLOUD VENDOR

See: Educause Paper Tracy Schroeder

If no one follows,are we leading?

Slow central IT ...… means no central IT

Be on the train, or under it.

If you can’t take risks...… end users will do it for you

You need to be more flexiblethan your SaaS

provider

Don’t fight redundancy anddon’t fight redundancy.

• Partnering• Inspiring• Coaching• Brokering• Enabling

Lead in a new way...

Resistance from within

google: “smarter every day backwards bike”

PRINCIPLES FOR LEADING IN THE CLOUD ERA

1. #1 Strategy - be tactical2. See with your customer’s eyes3. Build relationships 4. Influence trumps control5. Small is the new big6. Question everything

NEXT STEPS

?Sarah to the

rescue!

Cloudification Service

NEXT STEPS

Cloudification = Transformation

What is cloudification?• Partnership with campus IT units• refactoring for most effective use of cloud technologies and

containerization vs lift and shift• Central IT must be the expert that campus wants to come to for help• Enable not enforce• Understanding that if IaaS isn’t better with us, campus will make the

move without us• Allow campus technologists to focus on unit differentiators central IT

can help with the utilities

Feature Delivery trend

feature delivery

datacenter features cloud features

Cost trend

traditional infrastructure

Immutable InfrastructureQuote by Michael

Bryzek, the CTO and co-founder of GILT

Build your system using building blocks or containers

When you find a flaw or need to make a change

Start over to completely build the system you need

Resistance to change

http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/cloud-strategy-higher-education-building-common-solution

https://www.educause.edu/members/robert-carozzoni