Universities are embracing cloud computing services models for research, student engagement, and cross-university collaboration but struggle to determine the best way to use these services given high security concerns. As a result, there has been a strong interest and investment in private cloud solutions and interest in community clouds specific to the higher education sector.

Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Cisco, recently investigated the degree of cloud adoption by 12 universities in the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and India, primarily around learning, collaboration, research and administration.

What cloud technologies are being used — private, public, hybrid, or community — and what drove Universities to cloud? What benefits did Universities receive from the cloud and the challenges they faced. Also, what were the IT leaders’ evaluation of the vendor(s) they used and the kind of services vendors could provide?
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Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, cloud_enablement, cloud_service, forrester, higher education, private cloud

Wow, time flies.  When I started blogging at Cisco, 2 years back (here), helping organizations formulate their cloud strategy was top of my mind.  I’d ran a customer market research survey, and one of the things we learned that in certain parts of the world, the access bandwidth to the cloud was a significant concern -- in terms of reliability, cost and bandwidth available.  From this customer feedback, we concluded that Cisco WAAS -- Wide Area Application Services -- that helps accelerate applications and optimizes bandwidth usage  - was a key asset in helping our customers overcome this cloud adoption challenge.  And from this feedback, we realised that our Cisco WAAS Planning and Design Services were key to some of our customers adopting cloud.

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Tags: Borderless Networks, cisco_services, cloud, cloud_computing, cloud_enablement, waas