Education Policy, Business and Technology

Getting Comfortable with the Cloud

Campus Technology: Cloud solutions can drive IT efficiency, improve security, save budget dollars and more. Here's how four higher ed CIOs made the transition at their campuses. During his career, Russell Battista Jr., chief information officer for the University System of New Hampshire, has seen a dramatic shift in how universities approach cloud vendors and software-as-a-service. While he was an IT executive at Yale University (CT) from 2008–2013, he recalled, people were still nervous about moving data off-premise. "During my tenure there, the cloud was not highly adopted and, in fact, kept at arm's length," he said. But by the time Battista moved to Fairfield University (CT) in 2013, where he eventually served as interim CIO, people were getting more comfortable with the concept of student data in the cloud. "People also could see how it was driving efficiencies. We could buy a solution and go live within a month, instead of taking a year to define requirements." When Battista moved to New Hampshire in 2016 to head up IT for the state's four-university system, he was determined to lead a well-thought-out transition to software-as-a-service. "I tell campus IT leaders that it is inevitable.

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