Northeastern Illinois University had no permanent IT chief for many years before Kim Tracy took the position of executive director of University Technology Services about 6 years ago. As a result, he found a fragmented IT environment with multiple departments with overlapping duties, and it was his job to consolidate the infrastructure, processes and services.

Tracy was charged with improving operations and functions by coming up with a plan to streamline and standardize. The consolidation program had to support the university's existing needs and stand ready to support future ones too. Tracy shares what he learned from the process in a post at CIO Insight.

The first lesson is to look ahead and plan for growth. When implementing an ERP system, Tracy's team upgraded its servers and deployed a new storage system that would be able to handle future demands. Virtualizing servers positioned the university to be able to add new services without having to invest in new gear. 

Different back-up and recovery systems supporting different environments presented Tracy with another consolidation opportunity. The consolidation brought immediate benefits, including freeing up one staff member's time for other projects.

Moving IT services to the cloud further relieved the burden on Tracy's staff and gave them more time to improve services for the university's users.  He started the journey into the cloud with messaging security.

"Phishing and spear-phishing became onerous problems for the university, and dealing with them consumed much of our IT staff's time and energy. Our first response was to crank up inbound filtering with our previous appliance-based solution; however, this inevitably increased the number of false positives," he writes. "Rather than have 200,000-plus spam messages pounding at my mail gateway everyday-and dealing with the resulting bandwidth issues--I wanted to make this someone else's problem by moving to a cloud solution."

The end result of the consolidation program: Organizational silos broken down; lower costs; improved back-up; improved messaging security.

For more:
- see Kim Tracy's post at CIO Insight

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