As universities have evolved to keep pace with the “Information Revolution”, their technology stack has quadrupled, and technology debt has increased. It has led to creation of ‘application silos’ with no visibility of information outside it. Universities started with Mainframes and Midframes to satisfy their early technological needs and now increasingly use the Web and Cloud Data Applications. It is becoming complex and laborious for their IT Departments to keep all the different technological stacks integrated together so that correct decisions and analytics can be derived out of them.

Many universities have embarked on ambitious Information Technology programs to retire their IT Debt and embrace new cloud technologies and cloud applications. As the technology stack evolves – universities have a need to integrate these different platforms on the cloud (Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, etc.) and on-premise (legacy mainframes and midframes, existing enterprise data warehouses, etc.).

iPaaS

Integration Platform As A Service

Higher Education Institutions and Universities are increasingly employing iPaaS solutions to achieve their integration needs of synchronizing data movements between newer cloud-based applications and existing on-premises legacy applications. Some advantages of iPaaS solutions are:

  • Provide integration capabilities as a multi-tenant Cloud service
  • Mostly a web-based interface to create data integrations
  • Out of the box connectors to cloud applications and legacy on-premises applications
  • Easily achieve data integrations between Cloud to Cloud or Ground to Ground or Cloud to Ground and vice-versa
  • Subscription Service Model (You pay as you grow)
  • No extra costs to upgrade technology stack and software applications. These are upgraded by the vendor and are available to all users and clients.

A Typical Technology Stack

Higher Education Organizations now have a varied menu of cloud-based and ground-based applications to enable them to carry out their day-to-day operations and administration. For example, an University may use WorkDay for their HR processes, ServiceNow for their task processing and managing Operations workflows and Salesforce for their Student Admissions process and portals; whilst still having on premises Oracle Data Warehouses and maintaining legacy Mainframes as a System of Record. Figures 1 and 2 below show a typical technology stack that an University may have today.

Fig. 1 Cloud Applications

Fig. 2 Databases, Data Warehouses and Other Applications

Logan Data Offering

Logan Data, Inc. has extensive experience with clients in the education industry, including large universities, colleges and schools. We’ve applied their business rules and adhered to privacy requirements to integrate data from multiple sources in support of students analytics, facility performance, Human Capital management, Marketing and Reporting.