How ready is Higher Ed to move to the Cloud?

Cloud computing is no doubt on the mind of IT teams at every college and university. But moving to the cloud isn’t just an IT decision. The unique culture within Higher Ed impacts how cloud buying decisions are made. For example, students inhabit a multi-platform world and expect interoperability across devices and desktops. Funding and procurement is another consideration. Finally, consensus and an understanding of the benefits of cloud must be reached across a broad base of academic leaders and other stakeholders. Addressing these concerns beyond IT requires building consensus but also an ability to incent action within the Higher Ed campus decision making structure. By itself, this undertaking can be challenging but also brings benefits to students, IT, educators, researchers and those in curriculum design.

The cloud also places pressure on the CIO’s office. The CIO must consider questions like, what are the risks to cloud adoption? Do we have the right personnel skill set? Which workloads are best suited for cloud deployment? How will we develop, deploy and manage applications and services in the cloud? Can we assume the shared security risk model the cloud introduces? Usually, the CIO has to answer these questions and design an implementation plan. There are many crucial first steps that are needed to ensure an effective migration and seamless transition to the cloud. I developed a repeatable questionnaire/survey for answering these questions called the, Cloud Readiness Factor (CRF). See a short 30 second video on the CRF here.

The CRF takes a user through three phases of moving their organization to the Cloud: Considering—where basic questions around organizational and technical readiness are asked; Continuing---where next level questions beget actions to formulate plans and take actions steps; and Committed---where an organization puts in place resources (financial and personnel), time-frames, methodologies and a publicity plan for their move to the Cloud. Some of the questions users explore when going through the CRF include:

• Are we unified in our decision to move to the cloud?
• Are we discussing Training and Organizational Readiness to Move to the Cloud?
• Security. How will we ensure Security of our apps in the Cloud?
• Governance & Operations. Are we adopting current policies to the Cloud or creating new ones?
• Migration. How will we get current apps to the Cloud?
• What is our Acquisition, Contracting, & Bill back plan?
• Disaster Recovery & Resiliency. Are we migrating our current architecture or adopting new?
• Managed Services. Who will manage our cloud service?

Understanding which of these applies to your organization and which needs improvement is key in order to create a sustainable move to the Cloud. Given all the potential benefits of moving to the Cloud as well as challenges along the way, taking 15-to-30 minutes to walk through the CRF is a good investment of time on a path to even better Higher Education!