| | October 20158Productive Use of Data with Cloud Computing AssistanceBy Elias G. Eldayrie, VP and CIO, University of FloridaCloud computing benefits in the Education industryCloud computing assists IT organizations to excel in the two of the areas most important to success, agility and flexibility. With constantly changing technologies, increasingly sophisticated users and business requirements, enterprise wide services can be implemented in extremely short periods of time as required. Like businesses, higher education must respond rapidly to opportunities to implement a critical application. Many Cloud services are "pay as go" with fixed costs, an important point for fiscal planning, while providing more clarity and more predictable expenditures. This enables more cost effective ways to implement IT service without the financial burden of initial outlay, upgrades and maintenance. Funding services in this manner can provide the ability to move some capital expenses to operational expenses. IT organizations can then spend the higher percentage of their budget on service delivery rather than infrastructure. Investments can be made to assist the organization deliver better user services and allow leaders to focus on strategy and growth. This changes the focus of the IT from technology to the mission of the organization.As IT changes to more user centered and service driven operations, the organization can evolve to a lean IT model and outsource more basic levels of service. IT can become a focused professional service with advanced vendor management capability required to handle complex and multiple source partner relationships. Cloud computing can also help with device neutrality as an internet service, which is becoming more and more important in the realm of BYOE. Services can be scaled or deprecated quickly without long implementation or deprovisioning times.An example beneficial cloud computing is UFs contract with lynda.com to make training available site wide, to all students, faculty and staff. The training is pedagogically sound, presented in short segments and materials is created by knowledgeable instructors. The offerings cover hundreds of subjects with over 3,000 individual courses, that are continuously updated, and new subjects added as new technology and software become available. UF could provide neither the infrastructure nor the content expertise for this quality of service, even for many times more than the cost of the service. Faculty assign lynda.com modules to classes so students can arrive at class ready to progress without using valuable class time in teaching the basics. Faculty and staff take advantage of full courses and just-in-time single task training, with the variety of courses including technology, creative and business they can use right away.In My Opinion
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