Contributing article by Brandon Shopp, the Group Vice President of Product at SolarWinds

As technology remains a key part of the educational experience, IT teams continue improving processes that focus on enhancing educational outcomes while ensuring resilience across the digital ecosystem.
But, with a new year around the corner, IT teams may be asking: “What should our priorities be in 2023?”

To help answer that question, here are three considerations IT leaders must consider as they plan their 2023 IT strategy.

1 Protect student data

Cyberattacks against schools – from K-12 through higher education – are rising. The education sector experienced a 44% increase in cyberattacks in 2022 compared with 2021. And the impacts are significant; in 2021, the cost of ransomware attacks on schools and colleges alone was $3.6 million, with ransom payouts soaring from $220,000 to $2 million.

While schools have increased their cybersecurity budgets in recent years, challenges remain.
According to the 2022 SolarWinds Public Sector Cybersecurity Survey, a key security obstacle is threat detection and remediation. Observability of security events and threat data is a major challenge for IT pros, which can limit their ability to identify and act upon malicious activity.

In 2023, IT pros must prioritize the adoption of centralized monitoring technology. This isn’t just best practice, it’s a key requirement of The White House Cybersecurity Executive Order.

An easy first step towards compliance and improved threat detection and remediation is to use modern security information event management (SIEM) tools to monitor activity on school networks.

A SIEM monitors suspicious activity and compliance issues 24/7 by gathering logs from apps and systems located in a centralized location across hybrid environments. In this way, teams can quickly cut through the clutter, pinpoint security vulnerabilities and potential threats, and prioritize where they should focus their limited resources.

2 Automate manual IT tasks

Schools and universities are increasingly adopting technologies to automate administrative workflows, enrollment processes, and assessments. The same should be true of IT.

By automating manual IT tasks, education institutions can free up resources to work on higher-value initiatives while improving resilience and security.

Areas that are ripe for automation include network management, user provisioning, patch management, and ITIL service automation. Automation also makes managing complex environments easier.

By aggregating data from across the IT environment, automated insights can alert IT teams when something isn’t right and why it isn’t right – whether it’s a software vulnerability or configuration drift on the network. With this insight, they can move from a reactive to a proactive mode as they address problems across the IT ecosystem.

3 Network stability

A growing IT performance challenge facing schools is the huge number of connected devices on their networks – particularly during peak registration and testing periods. Ensuring a consistent experience across the district or faculty will be key for students to have a smooth learning experience.

To help IT managers grapple with this, teams need a way to automatically discover and visualize network devices and their health – across hybrid environments. The better they can picture the environment, the easier it is to understand problems. Automation can help with this process.

For example, auto-generated maps of critical network paths can help IT pros can answer the question: “Is it the app or the network?”, and quickly isolate what’s contributing to performance issues – in a user-friendly way.

The bottom line

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption to education systems, accelerating the adoption of remote learning and new content delivery tools. But these technology solutions have significantly increased the network perimeter and attack surface.

For students to continue to enjoy rich, immersive, and expanded digital learning, IT leaders must prioritize the right approaches to mitigating complexity and cyber risk in 2023.

Featured images: Serhii Bolshakov, iStock. 

The post Tech in 2023: 3 Priorities for Education IT Leaders appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Today’s contributor, Brandon Shopp, is the Group Vice President of Product for IT management software provider, SolarWinds. In this article, Shopp discusses the digital transformation of higher education, and what IT professionals need to do to innovate institutions. 

The past year has forced institutions to re-evaluate their IT roadmaps in a post-pandemic world. Priorities have shifted, and the idea of returning to “normal” seems an impossible reality for higher education.

These are the findings of EDUCAUSE’s list of top 10 IT priorities for higher education which takes an optimistic view of how technology can help redefine the campus. Indeed, the report concludes “…the higher education we deserve cannot be created without technology,” whether protecting and securing data, encouraging the digital fluency of staff, or producing more student-centric and equity-minded systems.

But for the technology-enabled business model to be sustainable, IT leaders must first consider the underlying IT infrastructure. Many institutions assume their networks and data centers can handle the digital transformation. But newer digital operations strain network resources and create performance issues and security vulnerabilities, ultimately jeopardizing an institution’s ability to respond to change.

As they look to set their institutions up for success in a post-pandemic world, IT leaders may be asking, “Are we prepared?”. To help answer that question, here are three considerations higher education institutions must consider as they map out their IT priorities.

1. Build visibility into IT infrastructure

A critical starting point for IT optimization is to achieve immediate visibility into various aspects of the institution’s infrastructure. With this observability, IT professionals can understand what is required to right-size and optimize their infrastructure and ensure a friction-free user experience.

For instance, infrastructure weaknesses should be identified and mitigated to accommodate new software and hardware loads. A single pane of glass monitoring tool is ideal because, in contrast to tools operating independently, it gives network administrators a comprehensive view of network operations and usage trends. By using accurate and actionable monitoring data, they can proactively prevent modernization issues from impacting learning and operations.

2. Identify current performance issues

Observability can also support the strategic IT planning process. Updating infrastructure is a complex and time-consuming process for any institution. Before vendor contracts are signed and solutions procured, acquisitions must go through internal planning and approval, budgeting, and ordering.

But with visibility into usage trends such as average peak loads, demands on core networking hardware, the number of concurrent users for critical applications, or any other insights across multi-vendor devices, IT teams can better plan for infrastructure upgrades and with ample time to line up funding.

3. Ensure observability that evolves with needs

As higher education works to become more dynamic and agile, successful institutions will be those designed to achieve continuous observability into the moving parts of the network and data center – without dealing with tool sprawl.

Too much monitoring creates headaches for IT teams. Stove piped dashboards, a sea of alerts, and conflicting data can make it hard to pinpoint real issues. However, monitoring doesn’t have to be complicated. The right monitoring tools should consolidate network, operations, and security data points from various sources and be simple enough so non-specialists can use them without extensive training. Importantly, they must also be modular to ensure they can scale as digital transformation projects evolve on-premises, in the cloud, and across hybrid environments.

Getting visibility is the first step to sustainable transformation

As institutions redefine the campus and better incorporate IT into the learning and student experience, college and university leaders must re-examine what their organizations will look like in the future. Priorities have shifted, and secure, scalable digital transformation is now a must-have. Gaining visibility is the first step to forging ahead with these initiatives.

Featured image: monkeybusinessimages, iStock. 

The post The Top 3 Considerations for IT Pros To Set Their Institution Up for Success appeared first on eLearningInside News.