Presentation at Educause Southeast 2012 - The ever-costly hardware refresh cycle for administrative systems, coupled with budget cutbacks and IT audit findings, prompted five community colleges and their system offices to explore hosting or cloud computing as an alternative to independent systems at each of their campuses. Is collaborating in such a move to the cloud truly a viable option for lowering or maintaining current costs, both in real dollars and in staff hours? Can benefits be realized in terms of providing enhanced, more secure services, better redundancy, and increased availability and scalability? What issues arise when institutions collaborate in such a venture? Bring your own experiences and questions to this open dialogue where we'll create a working roadmap that you and others can follow.

1. An Exploration: Moving Your Enterprise
to a Cloud Collaboration
Thomas Danford | Tennessee Board of Regents
Fred Lewis | Northeast State Community College
May 31, 2012
#DISC22

2. AGENDA
 This is a Discussion Session
(Already hosting, Considering Hosting, Corporate Sponsors)
 Some background
 Discussions
 The economies of scale in collaboration
 Tangible benefits #DISC22A
 Pros & cons #DISC22B
 Staff & management concerns #DISC22C
 Roadmap items #DISC22D

3. ABOUT THE TENNESSEE BOARD OF REGENTS &
NORTHEAST STATE COMMUNITY COLLEGE
 Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR)
 Public post-secondary education system est.1972
 6 universities, 13 community colleges and 27 technology
centers with programs in 90 of Tennessee’s 95 counties
 200K+ Students, 14K+ employees, and a budget in
excess of $2.4B
 Northeast State Community College
 Founded in 1966 and under the governance of the TBR
since 1983
 Enrollment of 6,775 students

4. A HISTORY OF BOTH COLLABORATION AND
CLOUD COMPUTING
 Collaboration
 Online Degree Program (RODP)
 System Maintenance Office (SMO) & DBA Collaborative
 Business Intelligence (BI)
 Cloud (Hosting) Computing
 Learning Management Systems
 Self Hosted (WebCT at UoM)
 Commercial (D2L)
 Most recently Administrative …
 In the State of Tennessee’s Data Center
 Other

5. COLLABORATIVE “CLOUD” COMPUTING
Economies of Scale $

6. #DISC22A
TANGIBLE BENEFITS (TIER 4)?

7. TANGIBLE BENEFITS (TIER I – IV)
Physical Plant
• Intruder Secruity (Guards, Locks, Cameras, etc.) (State Audit concern)
• HVAC & Environmental Controls (Closed system, Redundant, Excess capacity)
• Power (N+1 Redundant, 2 circuits, Independent path, PDU, UPS/Battery)
• Diesel Generator (Redundant, 5 days operation w/o refueling)
• F-4 Tornado Rated Facility, Not on a floodplain
• Fire Detection & Suppression (State Audit concern)
• Bandwidth & Connectivity (Multiple providers, Independent path)
Infrastructure
• Offsite Data Replication (Disaster recovery/Business Continuity)
• Network Management (Firewalls, Load balancing)
• Server Failover
• Enterprise SAN with commodity disk space (fiber vs. SATA)
• Enterprise Backups (Disk 2 Disk 2 Tape, 30 day onsite disk recovery, Deduplication)
• 4 Year Hardware Refresh
• System and Security Monitoring Appliances & Software (HP OpenView, Security)
Service Levels (Represents Increases in Staff Capability Presently Unavailable)
• Deep bench of Technicians (Networking, Server Admin, DBA)
• Network/Servers/Databases monitored 24 X 7
• Patches and upgrades are managed (State Audit concern)
• Strict Change Control Policy is enforced (State Audit concern)
• Help Desk is available 24 X 7
• Disaster Recovery Plan and Testing (State Audit concern)
• Full-time Security Officer & Staff of 30

8. #DISC22B
HOSTING – PROS & CONS?

9. PROS – CAMPUS
 IT staff can be repurposed to more “value add”
job functions
 Better computing infrastructure w/o large
capital expenditures
 Pooling resources results in lower overall
costs (15-30%)
 Standardization across application suite
 A more robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy

10. PROS – CAMPUS (CONTINUED)
 Less complex IT audits
 Enhanced security within Banner
 Lower licensing costs for OS, DBMS,
compilers, etc.
 “On-sight” support with proactive monitoring

11. CONS – CAMPUS
 Perceived loss of control of system/data
 Perceived concerns for long-term employment
 Campus may have to alter processes to fit into
hosted environment
 Scheduled downtimes for maintenance

12. PROS – SHARED ENVIRONMENT
 Standardization of system equipment
 Scheduled maintenance & 24x7 staff support
 Standardized system processes
 “Force multiplier” doing more with less for the
campuses
 Enables staff to “specialize”

13. CONS – SHARED ENVIRONMENT
 Additional security concerns
 Outages will effect more than one campus
 Internal changes with development practices
 Complex infrastructure configurations

14. #DISC22C
STAFF & MANAGEMENT CONCERNS?

15. STAFF & MANAGEMENT CONCERNS
 Position elimination or demotion
 Necessitation of learning new skillset(s)
 Moving from an “eyes down” environment to one
of customer interaction
 Moving from providing to provisioning (brokering)

16. #DISC22D
DEVELOPING ROADMAP ITEMS?

17. CLOUD COMPUTING ROADMAP ITEMS
Objective: Provide for an orderly migration to a cloud computing environment
Opportunity & Concerns
Current State Analysis Business Case & Roadmap
Identification
Activities Activities Activities
 IT management interviews and surveys  Identify key opportunities and benefits  Define key initiatives to achieve desired
 Stakeholder interviews and surveys  Establish Executive Dashboard Vision and future state capabilities
 IT architecture analysis priorities  Finalize statement of work and project plan
 IT budget analysis  Develop initiative write-ups including:  Identify interdependencies and required
– Project principles & desired outcomes implementation sequencing
 IT staffing analysis
– Roles and expections  Prepare project budget
 Review existing audit and risk analysis reports
and documentation – Budgeting and resource allocations  Negotiate service level expectations
 Cloud/hosting vendor capabilities research  Document overall changes to process,  Develop a talent management program
technology and data  Present consolidated roadmap, metrics design
Deliverables  Finalize framework for governance and and related definitions to executive leadership
 Current State assessment (gap analysis and related initiatives
process capability) Deliverables
 Interview key findings and observations
Deliverables  Statement of Work (SOW) Project Plan/Work
 Future State Capability Vision Breakdown Structured (WBS)
 Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) Estimate
 Principles of Implementation  Detailed Budget
 Governance Structure  Service Level Agreement (SLA) & Dashboards
 Budgetary Proposal  Job descriptions and staff development plans
 Contract with terms & conditions

18. THANK YOU
fdlewis@northeaststate.edu
tdanford@tbr.edu