| Cloud Deployments @Institutions |
Oslo School of Architecture & Design (AHO) UNINETT/Norway July 2016
Why the cloud?
Students at AHO had access to a personal storage space of 4 Gigabyte on school servers. With a steady increase in use, and in file size, they were running out of space. By moving to Box, AHO could offer safe storage to the students, as well as unlimited space.
User Satisfaction
The feedback from the students is very positive. Today’s students want things to be simple and flexible – and not always on campus to study. Also, Box meets their need for collaboration, both with other students and with faculty. Students are also pleased to not have to deal with VPN technology and are pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and rich feature set.
Everyone who has ever lost important data knows how frustrating that is. A laptop can be dropped on the floor, or be stolen, or files can go missing in all kinds of other ways. It is a revelation for people when they realize that their files are often more secure on Box than on their own computers.
Next Steps
This type of storage for students and faculty is in sync with how AHO envisions future operations. Universities continue to grow in size through mergers; AHO envisions it will be one of a very few small HE institutions in Norway. Therefore, it is essential to reduce risks associated with having a small ICT staff. Cloud services are an ideal solution to this challenge and more and more services will move from in-house operations to the cloud to maximize limited resources and personnel.
Lessons Learned
It is necessary to put in place an incentive a plan to encourage adoption over free 3rd party services, such as Dropbox, to meet minimum usage requirements. Incentives can be formal/legal, financial, or functional
NREN Support
UNINETT and NorduNET played an important role helping the university to comply with legal requirements and obtain attractive pricing.
