Providing access to robust connectivity is critical to ensuring today's students are college and career ready. As such, federal, state, and district-level leaders have dedicated a significant amount of time, effort, and resources toward improving our schools' external broadband access, including both Internet access and wide area network (WAN).…

The education sector remains abuzz with cost-cutting expectations despite pressures to increase services. Automation of costly manual tasks could save funds for many of these institutions, specifically in data protection. The IT departments of schools and universities can take advantage of a proven cost-savings opportunity in data protection that…

School business administrators have long recognized the need for a workable data recovery plan regardless of cause. Yet many have not reassessed their current data backup and recovery capabilities, perhaps because they have not experienced a catastrophic failure. There are three reasons school business administrators may not realize or recognize…

The Association Supporting Computer Users in Education (ASCUE) is a group of people interested in small college computing issues. It is a blend of people from all over the country who use computers in their teaching, academic support, and administrative support functions. ASCUE has a strong tradition of bringing its members together to pool their…

Much recent discussion has focused on the pros and cons of cloud computing. Some institutions are attracted to cloud computing benefits such as rapid deployment, flexible scalability, and low initial start-up cost, while others are concerned about cloud computing risks such as those related to data location, level of service, and security…

When the author was brought on as CIO of Westmont College in October 2008, the president, Board of Trustees, and campus environment made it clear that technology needed a major overhaul to meet the college's growing requirements. Also, these changes needed to happen without significantly increasing the IT budget or staff. Marketing Charts…

The University of Washington (UW) adopted a dual-provider cloud-computing strategy, focusing initially on software as a service. The original project--to replace an obsolete alumni e-mail system--resulted in a cloud solution that soon grew to encompass the entire campus community. The policies and contract terms UW developed, focusing on…

Current technology enables schools to provide remote or virtual computing labs that can be implemented in multiple ways ranging from remote access to banks of dedicated workstations to sophisticated access to large-scale servers hosting virtualized workstations. This paper reports on the implementation of a specific lab using remote access to…

Cloud computing is a growing field, addressing the market need for access to computing resources to meet organizational computing requirements. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the factors that influence an organization in their decision whether to adopt cloud computing as a part of their strategic information technology planning.…

There's no silver bullet to information security; universities must continue to keep their antivirus, anti-spyware, firewall, and patch management systems in good working order. These days, the largest target for hackers appears to be university databases. Now, universities are searching for new solutions to safeguard those systems. This article…

As technology grows more pervasive in education, the data recovery issues that school systems encounter are becoming increasingly problematic, as districts work to accommodate a range of concerns that do not encumber commercial businesses. State and federal laws often require schools to report on student populations and educational progress…

This article profiles the winners of this year's competition for outstanding technology innovation on US college and university campuses. The winners are: (1) Rice University, Texas (virtualized networks); (2) Drexel University, Pennsylvania (rich media); (3) Harvard Business School, Massachusetts (network management); (4) Louisiana State…

The concept of convergence has evolved significantly during recent years. Today, "convergence" refers to the integration of the communications and computing resources and services that seamlessly traverse multiple infrastructures and deliver content to multiple platforms or appliances. Convergence is real. Those in higher education, and especially…

Implementation of information systems has lagged in many areas of clinical healthcare for a variety of reasons. Economics, data complexity and resistance are among the often quoted roadblocks. Research suggests that physicians play a major part in the adoption, use and diffusion of information technology (IT) in clinical settings. There are also…

The EDUCAUSE Current Issues Committee, whose members review and recommend the set of IT issues to be presented each year, conducted a Web-based survey in December 2006 to identify the five of thirty-one IT issues in each of four areas: (1) issues that are critical for strategic success; (2) issues that are expected to increase in significance; (3)…