Until a few years ago, many higher education IT leaders talked about “the cloud” in future tense. Today, conversations around cloud technologies carry much more urgency. It’s no longer a trend to analyze, or a “nice-to-have” to muse over… but a reality to embrace.

Florida International University (FIU), a top  public research university located in Miami, is among the institutions making the move to cloud. More than 58,000 students are enrolled across two campuses and multiple centers,  including two international locations and its own research station 60 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in the Florida Keys. 

With the university’s goal of continued growth, Robert Grillo, FIU’s chief information officer and vice president of IT, anticipated that cloud would become increasingly important to the school’s strategy. Historically,  FIU has been a PeopleSoft user since the early 2000’s, operating on 30 PeopleSoft databases in a datacenter built in the 90’s. With more than 100,000 PeopleSoft users and 1,000 interfaces in their ERP system alone, their existing footprint was complex, but this didn’t deter Grillo and team.

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“As we continue to grow, we will never be able to hire enough resources to serve all of our students. The question is how we can use technology to better serve our students,” said Grillo. “To create an exceptional educational experience, we need to take advantage of technology to streamline processes and cut costs to rededicate those resources back to students.”

The FIU team had four motivations in mind when considering the move to cloud:

  • Reinforcing disaster recovery: Because Florida’s temperate ocean location makes it hurricane prone, the university needed to bolster its disaster recovery capability and ensure business continuity. In the event that a university’s on-premises systems are disrupted or damaged, data can be recovered and production restarted with the assurances of cloud.
  • Access to continuous innovation: The ability to implement innovations simply and swiftly is key to staying competitive in the higher education world. As the school experiments with new offerings in the wake of the pandemic – telehealth offerings, blockchain for student government elections, and new teaching and learning models – cloud can help facilitate their rapid innovation by improving ability to quickly and easily incorporate new technologies. 
  • Cost considerations: The cost of building and maintaining on-premises datacenter is a capital expense that no longer meets an institution’s investment goals of agility and innovation.  By moving major systems to the cloud, universities can reduce hardware, service, and maintenance spend and reorganize IT workers to focus on strategic, high-value tasks that contribute more directly to the student experience.
  • Cloud provider partnership: Working alongside a cloud vendor can accelerate institutional transformation with access to resources and tools a university might not otherwise have.

FIU’s IT team considered Oracle and one other cloud service provider (CSP). After performing a proof of concept with each CSP, comparing performance against FIU’s on-premises architecture, Grillo’s team determined Oracle Cloud Infrastructure would be the best choice based on the results.

Since transitioning from on-premises to OCI, Grillo cited a handful of immediate improvements beyond the university’s original motivations:

  • The school has strengthened its security posture, gaining the protocols and tools that come native with cloud architecture. This relieves the institution of some cybersecurity responsibilities by automating tasks and lessening opportunities for human error.
  • On OCI, FIU inherits Oracle’s technology expertise, combined with the power of FIU’s in-house intelligence. This teamwork was particularly impactful during the migration itself; Grillo’s team tackled the integration with consulting and advisory help from Oracle.
  • Now that the university’s enterprise applications are all on OCI, FIU’s on-premises datacenter can be entirely dedicated to research-related high performance computing.  

With the benefits of cloud, FIU is positioned to continue carrying out its vision of leading transformative innovations with high-quality teaching and state-of-the-art research. They’re certainly paving a path for institutions looking to follow suit.

Many thanks to Robert Grillo for a thought-provoking conversation! To hear more about FIU’s move to the cloud, tune into the full conversation here.