Page 17 - Campus Technology, October/November 2018

CLOUD COMPUTING
GAMECHANGER
RETHINKING HOW TECHNOLOGY IS USED IN EDUCATION
SUCCESSFUL CLOUD MIGRATION INVOLVES CHANGING MINDSETS
The biggest challenge isn’t technological, says Oracle’s Geof Corb — it’s cultural.
MOVING TO THE CLOUD is not much different than any other technology migration, according to Geof Corb, vice president of customer success for Oracle Higher Education. As with other IT imple- mentations, focusing on communication and change management is essential for success.
In fact, it would not be a stretch to say that the biggest hurdle in moving to the cloud isn’t technological, he asserted — it’s cultural.
“Moving to the cloud involves shifting the mindset of an institution,” said Corb, who was deputy CIO at Johns Hopkins University before joining Oracle. In many ways, he said, success is defined by how well an institution — and its IT staff in particular — adopts this change in mindset.
FROM CUSTOMIZATION TO CONFIGURATION
Traditionally, many colleges and universities have developed highly customized versions of their software by “cracking open the source code” and making modifications to suit their needs, Corb noted. In a cloud environment, IT staff are no longer writing their own source code; instead, they are focused on system integration and configuration — and perhaps using application program- ming interfaces to extend the capabilities of an application.
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