Today, technology has become a key enabler across the education sector. However, the IT teams who play a vital role in delivering it continue to face hurdles in bringing their organisations up to scratch and maintaining their digital advantage.
Challenges
Connectivity demands: Across all levels of education, digital devices are proliferating both in the classroom and among students and staff. All these endpoints, therefore, need to interact seamlessly with each other to create smarter learning environments. This puts immense pressure on the networks, both in terms of ongoing performance and maintenance. Therefore, ensuring appropriate bandwidth to manage increased traffic, support higher device densities, and enforce access policies automatically is essential.
Data-driven decisions: To improve resource allocation for student success, institutions are turning to data-informed decision-making to increase enrollments, transform academics, and improve graduation rates. As networking infrastructure continuously collects user and device behaviour data, it can be an institution’s most comprehensive data source.
Cybersecurity: With students, faculty, and staff regularly accessing resources and systems through digital devices, the potential for cybersecurity attacks is high. Today’s threats may not just involve criminal activities, but also unintentional sharing of user credentials internally or inadequate security practices by suppliers.
Digital equity: With the pandemic and other societal forces spotlighting disparities in access to technology, education institutes are working to address digital equity in various ways. Unsurprisingly, wired and wireless networking infrastructure plays a critical role in closing the digital divide.
Success strategies
The cornerstone of facilitating students’ academic achievements for IT departments commences with network management, emphasising the continual improvement of network efficiency and security. Numerous key technologies and strategies can provide the right set of advantages:
AIOps: Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations or AIOps provides AI-powered insights to facilitate network troubleshooting and optimisation, workflow automation, and endpoint profiling for enhanced security. Automating these tasks can help IT departments optimise their time and resources, enabling them to pursue higher-value strategic tasks.
NaaS infrastructure: How does an IT team deliver seamless, secure, always-on connectivity while minimising the financial impact? They should consider a network-as-a-service (NaaS) model, which can accelerate an organisation’s modernisation while consuming minimal resources or budget, as it is flexible and easily scalable.
Cloud-managed location awareness: Achieving institutional objectives around data-driven decision-making requires IT teams to solve several challenges such as collecting, storing, and accessing data, obtaining actionable insights, and maintaining data privacy. However, advanced networking solutions can help by allowing the gathering of utilisation data and including highly accurate location awareness for collecting situational information. This is further analysed in the cloud for fast on-demand access.
Security: To secure data in complex academic environments, educational organisations must go beyond a perimeter-based firewall and deploy networking solutions with security engineered into every aspect of their wired, wireless, and WAN infrastructure. This involves using Zero Trust and secure access service edge (SASE) frameworks, which provide stronger defence across an entire IT stack, including users, connected devices, applications, network services, compute, and storage platforms. A Zero Trust network can automatically determine what devices are being connected and provide the appropriate level of access control based on preordained policies.
Thus, regardless of the priorities, modernising networking infrastructure is a vital for an educational institution to provide its students, faculty and others a secure, seamless, connected, and always-on learning environment.
The writer is Director - India at HPE Aruba Networking.
