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Pivoting to Continuous
Modernization in
Higher Education
Rather than rely on full-scale modernization initiatives every five or 10 years, campuses should take an ongoing, modular approach to updating their IT systems.
DAMIEN EVERSMANN
Chief Architect for Education, North America Public Sector Red Hat
COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES THAT
lack modern hardware and software
are more vulnerable to cybersecurity risks and less able to take advantage of the latest technology. During the pandemic, faculty, staff and students shifted to working and learning from home, but their institution’s IT infrastructure wasn’t necessarily ready
to support that remote work securely. At
the same time, nefarious individuals took advantage of the situation to launch attacks in greater numbers.
Now more than ever, the need for modernization is clear — and it’s time to
change the paradigm to constant, continuous modernization. Instead of investing millions of dollars every five or 10 years, institutions should consider putting a line item in their budgets every year to fund ongoing modernization.
As a powerful side benefit, institutions will start to develop a culture of change. When a curveball like a global pandemic hits, they will be able to adapt, and because they have been updating their networks all along, they will avoid attacks that exploit unpatched systems.
The Central Elements of IT Modernization
Continuous modernization involves making
small changes and regularly deploying
those changes under a methodology called continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). Users try out new features, and developers get immediate validation and testing throughout the entire process, which results in targeted and ongoing improvements.
Another key element is automation. When rote tasks such as spinning up virtual machines, configuring networks or resolving users’ help tickets are automated, IT administrators can focus on more complex activities, such as improving processes or incorporating new technologies.
In addition, containerization makes it easy to migrate applications and workloads back and forth from on-premises systems to the cloud as needed. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps IT administrators create modular application workloads, which is a key element of modernization because it enables institutions to update components rather than an entire system.
The Importance of a Standard
Operating Environment
It’s not uncommon for campuses to be running versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that are more than 10 years old. It’s usually
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