Higher Education IT: Complexity across the board

Let’s begin by saying, it’s hard to manage university IT. Why? IT service delivery at universities is a complex and intricate process, with huge demands on resource. The trend is - demand going up with resources increasingly lagging behind.

So, why all the complexity?

We can probably put this down to a few things, namely:

1. Growth of universities

Impact?- more locations, more remote learning.

Result?- Technology growth to underpin.

2. Meeting the needs of the ever-increasingly digital users

Impact?- More operational technology/IoT, more advanced systems to enhance experience.

Result?- Technology growth to enable.

3. Move to more cloud based systems

Reason?-Traditional methods didn’t scale well, improves latency issues for remote workers, easier to manage.

Result?- Issues migrating all systems resulting in Hybrid IT.

4. Skill gap in university IT teams

Impact?- Point solutions are brought in to solve a problem.

Result?- Increases ‘things’ that need to be managed, often requiring a specialist to utilise solution to its full capacity, compounding the problem.

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What is the impact of this complexity?

Putting it simply - it complicates everything, creating an uphill battle for IT teams, but let’s break that down:

Management and maintenance becomes increasingly difficult as more systems are added, there are more things to account for, understand, keep up to date and report on. Visibility can become hard to come by with more dark corners of the network being introduced, whilst requiring specialist skills to truly understand specific systems.??

This results in an inefficient process by non-specialist IT team members to ensure things are maintained correctly and things can be missed, quite easily. Creating more fires to put out, somewhere down the line.??

There are also cybersecurity impacts of this complexity - every new system introduced provides a new potential backdoor to your network, we speak more about zero trust principals here, also the impact of not scrutinising 3rd party technology is severe with the recent dark trace supply chain attack making the news. Adding new systems changes your cybersecurity posture and must be reviewed, risk assessed and actioned accordingly, but things become increasingly difficult as the architecture grows and changes over time.

Finally - the more straw you add to the pile, the more difficult it is to find the needle (Unless you have a metal detector - We talk about this at the end of this article). The more complex the architecture and components within it, the more of a challenge it becomes to investigate anything. It’s harder to find the root cause of performance issues, harder to maintain continuous improvement and harder to investigate incidents. It’s also difficult to judge the extent of an issue with cross platform visibility.

We've dug deeper into the challenges in managing 30,000+ students and provided some solutions here.