Making a bold move away from traditional IT enables Broward College to embrace its Cloud First vision and the business of helping students succeed.
What do you do when a client comes to you with big aspirations and an ambitious vision but is constrained by the realities of its sector? You find a way to make it work. That’s exactly what we did with Broward College.
Patti Barney, VP Information Technology, Broward College, sat down with our Technology Solutions team and laid out her challenges – skilled staff retention, application reliability and performance, network management and funding, and wireless coverage and quality.
Barney knew that change was imminent. It was time to move out of the business of IT and more into the business of education. The question became how.
An incremental journey toward Cloud First
Barney’s ultimate goal is to get to the cloud, but she knows it’s a progressive journey. She decided to start with the foundation, engaging CSPi for cloud-enabled Managed Hosting. For the past year, our Technology Solutions team has been responsible for Broward College’s network, storage, and server management and support.
Subsequent incremental phases include:
- Migration of enterprise applications to CSPi’s Hosted Private Cloud (built on HPE SimpliVity)
- Fully managed wireless solution
- Network Access Control
- Network remediation
Sharing risk and instilling confidence
It was a potentially tricky engagement. Barney had a lot of undefined future initiatives and a constrained budget. She was adamant about flexibility in the contract negotiation process.
Our Technology Solutions team prepared one contract, which detailed all of the potential services, with costs and options, even though Barney was only pitching Managed Services to her Board.
As a result, Barney was able to position CSPi as the Managed Services provider that would help Broward College achieve its cloud vision when it was ready.
A year into the Managed Services engagement, Barney has a renewed sense of confidence that Broward College is finally on the right track. She feels optimistic that IT will be able to fully actualize the Cloud First vision, taking the College to the next level.
And the education industry is taking notice. Broward College is being hailed as a thought leader and innovator for what it is doing in IT.
But Barney’s message is always the same when she presents on the transformation project. Broward College is an educator. She is doing what’s necessary for IT to focus on the business of education and help students succeed.
Read Broward College’s full story here.
Your success is our goal
Learn more about CSPi’s Vital Managed Monitoring and Management Services. Call 1-866-641-1159, email cloudservices@cspi.com, or visit www.cspitechsolutions.com. Be sure to ask the representative how you can receive your critical IT infrastructure health check.