Economic challenges in recent years have led many higher education institutions to stretch out their IT refresh cycles. Where many universities previously would replace aging infrastructure every three to five years, some are now trying to extend those periods to save money. However, IT experts note that putting off modernization also comes with costs.

By holding on to aging IT infrastructure, institutions may limit their ability to move forward and take advantage of modern technologies that could provide new capabilities while enhancing productivity and efficiency in current processes.

“Hardware — especially in on-premises environments — is aging,” says Chris Gibes, a manager in the hybrid infrastructure practice at CDW. “Institutions are holding on to gear longer than they traditionally have in the past. Now, we’re starting to see these refresh cycles impacting the ability of companies to actually improve and bring in new applications, and it’s also creating concerns about power consumption and reliability.”

Modernization provides a path for higher education to avoid these concerns, but they must understand several key strategic considerations. Successful modernization efforts will move workloads to optimized infrastructure components and take full advantage of new technology capabilities.

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Why Should Higher Education Institutions Try to Modernize?

Many institutions are looking to modernize their IT infrastructure to reduce maintenance costs, increase agility, and utilize automation.

“As the pace of emerging workloads, changing workload delivery, and mergers increasingly disrupt organizations, they can’t afford to spend time worrying about their application infrastructure,” says Matt Cobb, a solution architect team lead at CDW.

“Modernization initiatives provide increased agility, enable frictionless service delivery and, most important, allow highly skilled employees to focus on returning value.”

Modernization also provides access to new capabilities. “There are technological advances that companies want to take advantage of, and the most obvious one is artificial intelligence,” Gibes says. “We know that AI is coming and that organizations have to be ready for it.”

Even in its infancy, AI adoption is widespread. In fact, an August 2023 study by McKinsey found that 55 percent of organizations have adopted artificial intelligence for institutional functions.

To take advantage of AI, companies need infrastructure that supports it. This includes storage platforms that can keep up with the creation and movement of massive quantities of data, and processing power to handle the complex algorithms that AI relies on. Many colleges and universities are turning to the cloud to meet these needs, while others are purchasing hardware with advanced capabilities, such as high-powered graphics processing units to support the demands of AI workloads.

A Hybrid Future Requires Effective Strategy

As institutions include modernization initiatives in their IT infrastructure plans, the vast majority are implementing a hybrid model that includes cloud resources as well as on-premises hardware. According to a 2024 report from Flexera, 73 percent of organizations operate a hybrid cloud environment.

“This is something that’s happened over the past 10 years — this widespread adoption of public cloud — because people were getting services in the public cloud that they liked, but they needed to keep their on-premises environments as well,” Gibes says.

To see the best results, higher education institutions need to approach their modernization initiatives strategically. An effective first step is to rightsize their cloud investments. For example, the public cloud offers flexibility and seamless scalability for workloads that have intermittent demand. Keeping workloads with steadier demand in an in-house data center can help colleges and universities save money, provide greater control and address concerns about security and regulatory compliance.

“On-premises infrastructure usually has some characteristics that provide really good performance in certain circumstances,” Gibes says. “It also gives a company greater control over security.”

Any effective modernization effort needs a clear, comprehensive strategy to guide it. Many institutions don’t know where to start, but a trusted partner can help. A third party can assess an institution’s current IT infrastructure and map out a path to the new capabilities the university wants to enable. “There are a lot of paths that you can go down,” Cobb says. “Advisory services and assessments can help you along the path that’s right for you.”