A cloud-first strategy can offer significant benefits, but without a workload-based approach, institutions risk inefficiencies, rising costs, and operational silos. Over the past year, many education IT teams have struggled with escalating costs and the complexities of adopting and migrating to new technology stacks while maintaining the agility needed to support student success and administrative functions.
This session will explore how teams can take a cloud-smart approach, balancing performance, cost, and agility while ensuring seamless integration across multi-cloud environments. Not everything will reside in a public cloud, making it critical to design a multi-cloud strategy rather than ending up in one by default. We'll examine key factors that drive smarter workload placement, including data governance, compliance, latency, and financial sustainability—challenges that are particularly pressing in higher education, where data privacy, research computing, and budget constraints play a critical role.
Through real-world examples from institutions across Canada, we’ll highlight innovative strategies to optimize infrastructure while preventing fragmentation across IT and operations. Attendees will gain actionable insights on:
- Aligning cloud adoption with institutional goals, research needs, and budget constraints
- Leveraging automation for workload deployment in academic and administrative environments
- Avoiding technical silos through unified management and governance to support institutional agility
By focusing on the right workloads for the right environments, educational leaders can ensure their cloud investments drive long-term value. This session will equip IT professionals and executives with strategies to transform data center architecture without vendor lock-in, ensuring a future-ready, cost-effective, and scalable IT ecosystem for higher education.
