Cloud Infrastructure for Higher Education: The Sullivan Experience

The growth in data traffic within higher institutions has always been accompanied with the adoption of a more scalable IT infrastructure. With the increasing budgetary constraints, cloud computing (a disruptive technology) presents an attractive means to address the scalability challenges while realizing the potential of ubiquitous IT services. The on-demand business proposition of the cloud provides virtualized resources (software, platform, and infrastructure) with far-reaching efficiencies that have lowered the initial and operating IT costs for both small and large organizations. In migrating to the cloud environments, various organizations encounter challenges and experiences which are worthy of considerations by new entrants and established users. In this paper, we present the experiences of Sullivan University in transitioning to the complex cloud environment, in which a mixture of pilot and phased conversion steps were deployed in the migration process.