Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, schools had to rapidly pivot in the way they deliver instruction and perform administrative tasks. Throughout this virtual evolution, we learned remote and hybrid classrooms aren’t just viable alternatives for higher education — they’re likely mainstays that will continue to evolve as students get more choice and flexibility in their education.
However, because the modern campus is anywhere there’s a wi-fi signal, your school’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution needs to keep up. Many legacy systems, installed and maintained on-site, can’t handle the security and reliability needs of today’s higher education students, staff, and faculty.
As many schools around the country and the world have already figured out, the solution is in the cloud, and Ellucian’s suite of campus technologies are designed to make that transition easy, secure, and cost-effective.
Enabling student success
The goal of any thriving higher education institution is to ensure its students succeed. With Ellucian, you can give students the tools to learn, collaborate, and interact with campus materials when, where, and how they want.
“We can provide students with a simple, intuitive purpose-built SaaS solution that enables a modern user experience which establishes their school at the forefront of technology,” said Michael Wulff, chief technology officer for Ellucian. “Students want to have a native app-like experience when they interact with their school’s online platform.”
With Ellucian, you’re able to deliver that modern, unified experience no matter what students are doing across your platform, whether it’s enrolling in classes, adding funds to their residential dining account, or ordering a transcript.
One of the advantages of doing all of those tasks in the cloud is that the platform can scale to anticipate increased traffic, meaning fewer slowdowns during peak usage times, like early action for applicants and enrollment periods for active students.
Managed by experts
Because colleges and universities handle so much sensitive data from students, staff, faculty, and alumni, security is a critical part of any school’s computing platform. While moving your school’s sensitive data away from in-house servers and into the cloud sounds perilous to some, it’s actually a more secure method.
That’s because one of the key advantages of using a SaaS solution like Ellucian is that their expert team of R&D professionals (all of whom are 100 percent focused on higher education) is able to update and improve your platform in real time, keeping it constantly protected against threats. That’s increasingly important as higher education instruction becomes more virtual, which can leave legacy platforms exposed.
Ellucian is perfect for schools looking to make the transition to cloud computing because it easily integrates with third-party apps and existing systems. That means you can move as many or as few applications to the cloud as you like and add on services as you go.
“We can help you transition to the cloud at your own pace to meet your desired goals,” Wulff said.
With solutions for student information systems, human resources, finance, retention, recruiting, analytics, and more, Ellucian gives institutions the space to innovate. Learn more about how Ellucian’s cloud-enabled SaaS technologies can help bring your college or university into the future by visiting ellucian.com.
