C A S E S T U D Y
What benefits have academics and the university seen since implementing VMware’ s cloud solutions?
This whole journey started from a need to get good compliance. I walked into this organisation and I couldn’ t answer a critical question,‘ What ' s the total cost of ownership of technology in this organisation?’ I couldn ' t answer it because I didn ' t know where the technology was. I started speaking with the academics and asked,‘ Why don ' t you use the IT department as the shop of choice?’ It really came down to two factors: you ' re too slow and you cost too much. That was when I said,‘ If, first of all, I can make it self-serve, and secondly, I can make it free at the point of entry, will you take it? And the answer to that was yes.’
The great thing is, we built a private cloud. What nobody realised is that the onion layer around it, we control. All the security, all the ways in which we can do compliance, the patching, everything, all the normal stuff we need to do, happens. I don ' t have to worry now that an academic hasn ' t patched the box for 30 years and leaves it on the public Internet. As far as they ' re concerned, they go to a self-service portal. They pick the t-shirt size of the app of the actual server environments and the desktop environments that they need, they pick the operating systems they want, they pick the applications they want and deploy, which is exactly like going to the cloud. I ' m sitting there very happy, because I can see what resources are doing, and I know where my utilisation is. And then when those resources aren ' t being utilised, I go and ask the question,‘ Do you still need it?’ And if the answer is no, rather than having a box sat under a desk that ' s costing us a lot of money, we can put it back in the pool.
Our academics come and go with research projects and there are also so many variations to courses that will now also have an element of cybersecurity or AI within them, and being able to flex the courses in and out, it ' s significantly important to us.
How do you face the question of how relevant will the university be in 2045, taking into account the advancements made in AI?
We, as a leadership team, are now discussing exactly what a relevant higher education establishment will look like. We ' re
I think that ' d be thinking very long something fantastic – and hard around where does opening up education automation and AI fit into that? How to everybody. That ' s is it going to alter what I ' m trying to do. the way students engage? We ' re speaking with our student communities, because initially people said:‘ People will start cheating with AI.’ They don ' t spend that amount of money to come to a university to cheat with AI. The student population are very intellectually fine young people that are now being very
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