Universities do more with less — start with data

Most educational institutions are awash in data. There are student records, course data, IT logs, sensitive research data, data on university resource consumption — the list goes on. 

For many universities, data systems have grown increasingly complex — departments and programs add new tools as they become available, resulting in a data landscape that, over time, becomes fragmented. This often results in reduced visibility for all stakeholders as well as out-of-control costs. 

Having fast access to the right data at the right time can give you insights into student engagement and help you better allocate resources and make university-wide decisions based on data. With a high-level view of your data, you can find answers to questions around university resources, facilities, environmental conditions, resources, sustainability, and more. 

But for many universities, this data is dispersed across various departments, campuses, or technology solutions. Besides being inefficient and reducing collaboration, these data silos mean that universities are often paying for the same data multiple times through different tech vendors.

A fragmented data environment can lead to:

• Limited student support caused by disconnected systems, making it harder to deliver timely and personalized support

• Slower response time due to hours lost communicating between departments, collecting data, and synthesizing disparate information 

• Increased security risk as data and operations are fragmented, making it harder to maintain consistent visibility, governance, and protection

• Operational inefficiency as teams operate in silos, duplicating tasks as they work independently of each other 

Departments and programs often add individual data solutions as issues arise and new technology comes to market. However, this can lead to tool sprawl. A system with multiple data tools can result in a fragmented system riddled with inefficiencies.  

Layering on data systems is not a higher education digital transformation; instead, it leads to multiple disconnected workflows and results in more manual effort. With disconnected solutions, individual users will have less visibility into the overall data picture, compromising security and operations, and leading to analyst fatigue. As an institution, you’ll spend more on licensing costs as each data system comes with its own fees to implement and maintain.

When you shift to a unified data foundation, you connect data across systems and environments. By doing so, you help university teams uncover holistic, cross-department trends and patterns that can ultimately lead to better, more informed decisions that benefit everyone.

Bringing your data together on a single platform can enable it to do more work for you by reducing tool sprawl, data silos, and overall costs of data storage and usage. Tool consolidation can also facilitate collaboration on small teams with resource constraints so that departments aren’t duplicating work, and everyone — whether they’re developers, data analysts, or business decision-makers — is working off the same source data. 

When you have a higher education digital strategy based on data that is unified and easy to access, find, and share, the impacts can be far-reaching, enabling you to: 

• Provide real-time visibility in order to make better data-driven decisions that will benefit students and improve your security posture

• Accelerate troubleshooting and internal innovation through meaningful collaboration but also restrict access based on user group, especially for sensitive data

• Save costs by avoiding duplication, reducing technical debt, and moving with agility

• Inspire faster decision-making processes as high-level data is easy to access and understand

• Improve your security posture with fewer points of exposure

Once your data is on one platform, it can be used for multiple purposes from threat detection to network monitoring to application development. This allows you to maximize the value of your data while reducing tool sprawl. 

Elastic’s agile, search-based platform allows universities to store, access, find, and use all their data from one spot and empowers institutions to make their data work harder for them.

Cranfield University in Cranfield, England, uses a combination of on-prem and cloud-based Elastic Security running on Elastic Cloud to protect the data of its diverse community. With Elastic, the university is able to adhere to the strict security requirements of its business partners, including aerospace and energy partners, while allowing students to easily access critical information across a broad range of devices. Elastic provides Cranfield with a fast, scalable, unified solution in a single view and reduces demand on university resources, so IT staff can focus on improving university services and security.

For universities looking to do more with less, simplifying their data environment is key. When fragmented data solutions are streamlined, teams can operate with increased efficiency more securely and can spend more time looking to the future.

With Elastic, leaders can overcome data silos, unify and operationalize data, and apply AI holistically to defend against modern threats while improving efficiency. Elastic helps educational institutions support successful student outcomes while protecting security and privacy by consolidating massive amounts of siloed data into an accessible, unified, and AI-backed platform. Empower teams and optimize data management with Elastic for higher education.

To learn more about how Elastic can help your university do more with less, read our white paper Cybersecurity guide for public sector: Securing data and assets in the AI era, or visit Elastic for education.