By Monique Lucey
The final areas of the enterprise sure to be impacted by on-demand learning are the branch office and the remote user. Both tend to be at a distance from IT, and as a result present different challenges than their campus LAN and data center counterparts.
Let’s begin with the role that the branch office will play in an on-demand learning application rollout, which will be significant. After all, international partners, learning on-demand content producers, off-campus dormitories and satellite campuses are all a type of branch office in higher education. They need to share data with the main network, but have to do so across the WAN.
To ensure the privacy and integrity of data and to comply with government regulations, IT must encrypt data end-to-end and create secure tunnels. This could be difficult without management tools that can recognize and manage routers, switches and other branch infrastructure as well as control access at the user and device level.
IT will require an overarching management system that can apply institutional and regulatory policies to branch office activities surrounding on-demand learning. For instance, a third-party testing firm should be able to input a student’s grade into his record, but not access his financial aid or registration information. A sophisticated enterprise-wide management tool would be able to deploy, enforce and update centralized policies at the branch level.
In addition, most higher education institutions don’t have a plethora of IT staff to handle branch technical issues. An automated, centralized and – in some cases – virtualized switching environment would help IT support the widespread use of on-demand learning, and its expanded infrastructure, without having to add headcount.
Deploying these services in a multi-service router platform that supports routing, switching, security, voice and wireless replaces discreet devices, conserving valuable power and space.
A consolidated platform that can be pre-configured, shipped and remotely managed also reduces service calls and saves money as well as energy consumption and space in often constrained branch environments.
IT would be able to manage this branch infrastructure using a standard image monitored from a centralized console. Once that gear was up and running, IT could remotely and automatically push updates, patches and other critical maintenance tasks that would otherwise require on-site visits from tech staff.
If systems were somehow corrupted, IT could dial back to a recent, stored image saved to a central repository – again, without having to send out a technician.
Such tools would also provide IT a single view of all branch devices from a central console, enabling concise fault analysis and remediation. These sophisticated management tools make it possible for one person to easily monitor and manage thousands of sites.
The same can be said of the remote user environment. IT could enable users such as faculty, admissions personnel, financial aid workers, third-party testing firms, partner universities and even students themselves to access information within on-demand learning applications without compromising security or privacy.
The centralized management system that controls the data center, campus LAN and branch offices can also be used to set policies for remote user and device access. For instance, IT could set rules that restrict faculty from reading student homework on an unauthorized mobile device. That kind of granularity would ensure the highest level of productivity without risking data leaks.
These management tools would provide incredibly flexibility. Higher education institutions could set up short-term partnerships with other universities and allow their faculty and students access to content from remote locations.
IT could also take advantage of centralized management to ensure that no single user or branch is saturating the network. By monitoring traffic closely, IT could improve capacity planning and budgeting for infrastructure upgrades.
The combination of intelligent management software and intelligent switches would enable IT to easily and cost-effectively handle on-demand learning rollouts to branch offices and remote users.
In the next blog, we’ll dive into strategies for securing one demand learning in the wireless enterprise.
Tags: Network Management, Routing, Security, Switching
