Discussion
As higher education IT budgets shrink, and we are asked to do more with the same or less, the toolkit universities use needs to evolve. Prior to the mobile web and BYOD, there was, and frankly still is, the client server model. Prior to that, there was mainframe. Universities have seen and survived many technology changes and will see many more.
Technology is an enterprise enabler. It serves to facilitate the pedagogical and research mission of the modern university. The cloud is a framework that can allow us to meet this need, and change with it much more quickly than can be done on premise or manually.
A services inventory is a required first step for this journey. From there, we will travel two parallel paths that then meet in an ideal outcome of a fully automated and scalable service. Responsive to the cyclical, burstable, at times, unpredictable nature of University needs.
Three categories of systems tend to exist on a campus: commercial applications that typically form the foundation of Enterprise Resource Planning systems, custom developed applications that address specific business needs or workflows of the university, and research applications. These types of systems can benefit greatly from cloud methods but your own campus need should be used to determine how far down the path you proceed. For some applications, the cost of refactoring the application to be automatically scalable is too great. For others, retirement and replacement is in the near future so it is not cost effective to invest the resources. It is beneficial to avoid technical debt, but don't do so at the cost of additional capabilities to support the university mission. Avoid the temptation to leverage technology, for technology's sake.
Brad Greer, University of Washington
This graph represents a spectrum. Not all applications will be be in public cloud. Not all are in private cloud currently. General movement from left to right (or LL to UR) but not 100%.
http://staff.washington.edu/brad/cloud1/