Drive Digital Transformation in Education with Key Initiatives

Cloud modernization for streamlined data integration

With the explosive growth of data and high demand for access to data resources, many educational institutions are embracing the cloud for its agility, flexibility, and cost savings. To take full advantage of cloud benefits, however, you need a unified, cross-department and cross-campus platform that can support real-time processing for fast decision-making, help streamline application management, and handle both the immense scale and constant rate of change for student, faculty, and alumni data.

An integrated platform as a service (iPaaS) offers universities and other education institutions a flexible, cloud-based integration and data management solution that is built to scale—fast. You can access and integrate data from any application, in any format, and deliver that data throughout an institution to help you:

• Attract and retain the best students
• Accelerate fundraising campaigns
• Increase operational efficiency
• Reduce data management costs

Protecting private data

Campuses are full of personal data and valuable intellectual property, but it can be challenging to identify, locate, and protect sensitive data in a highly distributed environment. A unified, scalable approach to discovering, cleansing, and governing massively distributed data—and ensuring that quality and protection remains high when data is moved—helps educational institutions do the following:

• Discover the location, movement, usage, and protection status of sensitive data to ensure compliance, inform audits, and detect potential misuse.
• Effectively implement data protection strategies to reduce the risk of expensive, reputation-tarnishing data breaches.
• Use data masking or block sensitive and confidential information from unauthorized access so application end users, testing teams, database administrators, business analysts, and other users can perform their work without sacrificing data security. 

Capturing the full constituent lifecycle with MDM

Higher education IT faces a unique data management challenge as they seek to maintain, track, and align data across distributed data sources. Constituent data changes constantly as they move through a “life cycle” at their university, progressing from applicant to student to alumni, or as faculty and staff gain seniority and move between roles. The high number of touchpoints across different—but related—interactions make it difficult to create a “single version of the truth.” For example, a student may have multiple current addresses: a home address for tuition billing, a dorm address for school year residency, and a summer internship location.

By presenting a profile view that captures the full constituent lifecycle, a well-designed master data management (MDM) solution provides the consistent, trusted data that education institutions demand. The Informatica MDM solution is highly configurable and has a strong matching engine that allows it to identify, track, and present the right information to the right people at the right time so you can:  

• Better coordinate outreach to students, constituents, and donors with less risk of duplication
• Provide a consistent experience across a school’s departments, programs, and channels
• Enable institutional knowledge sharing between organizations at a single campus or between different schools within a district