Page 11 - Campus Technology, August/September 2017

CLOUD COMPUTING
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | August/September 2017
security for an important system like enterprise resource planning (ERP) by running it in-house, Ravishanker said. “As the CIO, you have to accept that this is a flawed argument. I have two people who worry about data and network security. Do you really think we provide better security than companies that have hundreds of people worrying about this? We had this conversation when we went to Google Apps. Google has hundreds of people worrying about data security, including keeping up with current and potential future threats, which we simply cannot afford to do with existing resources.”
Ravishanker said that for a variety of reasons ERP is one of the most difficult things to move to the cloud, but when it was time to renew Wellesley’s ERP system, the college examined its options and decided that Workday, which provides ERP in a software-as-a-service offering, was a viable option.
Wellesley began transitioning human resources, payroll and benefits to
Workday in March 2016 and went live in January 2017. Finance went live this summer. The college expects its student information system to go live in late 2018 or early 2019.
“[Workday] takes advantage of the cloud differently than legacy ERP systems,” Ravishanker noted. “When legacy vendors say they are moving to the cloud, they are basically forklifting your on-premise solution or making slight variations to existing code, but not exploiting all of what the cloud has to offer.” One of the key differences, he explained, is that a system like Workday has a single code base for all users. It is very much like Google Apps in that sense. Annually the company announces two major upgrades, but every week there are some tweaks here and there, Ravishanker said. The pain of upgrades with the on-premise solution is gone.
“We used to have to touch base with every functional office on campus to make sure that they were OK with the dates of upgrades — and we relied on
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