What do university students and faculty want? A reliable, high-performance network connection while on campus. When do they want it? Now.
John Norris, CIO at Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU), recognized this. Last year, the CIO took on the challenge of looking for an alternative to its traditional wired and wireless solutions after students expressed their frustrations with the campus’s outdated network infrastructure.
“We had some students previously say that they felt like the technology was a hindrance to [them] completing their education,” he said.
Slow network connectivity was a problem for JCSU students and faculty due to the university’s legacy networking equipment inability to support larger bandwidths, a problem that escalated following the pandemic when students continued to enroll in online courses.
“That meant even if they were on site, they would still sign up for many online courses, which meant an additional strain on our network because frankly, it wasn’t built for that,” Norris said. There are around 2,000 users on the campus on a typical day, according to Norris, with peak times falling between 9am and 3pm.
However, user complaints weren’t the only issue. Norris told IT Brew that the costs associated with its legacy network equipment were becoming an increasing problem for the university.
“It went from how many access points do you have to how many users are on those access points and that’s how we’re going to license you,” Norris said. “And, of course, the proliferation of wireless devices has just exploded.”
The CIO told us that maintenance costs were also weighing on the university, and the dated networking equipment was no longer meeting its security needs.
“Some of the old equipment just would not support the newer security features that needed to be in place,” he said.
Due for a change. The Charlotte, North Carolina–based private historically Black university, was in no position to “do a forklift overhaul and put in new equipment,” Norris, who has worked at the university since 1999, told us. This, combined with the desire for a level of predictability, led it to Nile, a network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider founded in 2018 by a pair of former Cisco executives. Under the NaaS model, organizations rent networking services from a provider, removing them from the burden of maintenance.
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“It’s almost like we’re leasing the equipment that they put on campus, and they’re providing the support and support and service for it,” he said, later adding that the university was able to keep its old network going as it fully transitioned to Nile’s services.
Ryan Mallory, COO of Flexential, a data center colocation service provider with over 40 data centers nationwide, told IT Brew that virtual networking started to emerge around 2015 and has really begun to mature in recent years, capturing the attention of all types of organizations from startups to Fortune 500s.
“I would say, from a vertical perspective, we’ve seen it up and down the stack,” he said.
Nile’s campus NaaS solution has been deployed over 400 times in 18 countries. Nile co-founder and CEO Pankaj Patel told IT Brew that he has seen “tremendous interest” in its services since launching it in 2022.
“What attracts people to us is incredible simplicity,” Patel, who retired from his role as EVP and CDO at Cisco in 2016, said.
The verdict. So far, things have been going well for JCSU since it made its switch to Nile’s NaaS service.
“They do a good job of understanding our environment, and there’s a dashboard that keeps us abreast of what’s going on,” Norris said. “They usually know before we know if there’s an issue on our network.”
Norris told us that the university now has the capacity to double, and even triple, its bandwidth when needed. He added that Nile is able to adjust the campus’s network to best fit its evolving demand.
“In the summertime, they can tell that there’s not a lot of students in the residence hall and they will tweak the network so that more of the capabilities are with the people in the finance office or the people in the admissions office and whatnot,” Norris said.
Most importantly, JCSU’s students and faculty are reaping the benefits of the change.
“We’re happy with the current situation,” Norris said. “It’s going to help our students reach their goals and we’ve satisfied the need that our faculty have expressed of ever-reliable connection at all times.”