Business Challenges

Educational institutions, and their respective IT departments are under constant pressures to provide robust technology services to attract and retain the best students and faculty. Coupled with managing compliance standards, such as HIPAA, PCI, and FERPA, have dramatically added to the complexity and taxing limited personnel and budgets.

IT infrastructure is naturally complex – spanning physical and virtual environments – while needing to satisfy multiple compliance requirements at the same time. Educational institutions have the added complexity of unplanned peaks in utilization of network resources, and applications, creating additional risks of downtime caused by bottlenecks. Viruses, unauthorized access to systems, and the loss of personal information or research data could also cost a higher education institution their reputation and status.

Technology initiatives are a compelling differentiation in attracting the best minds to universities and colleges. Campus IT resources include research data, intellectual property, and personal student and faculty records. IT staffs must remain vigilant, constantly monitoring suspicious activity, monitoring access and usage of sensitive data, protecting against, data breaches.