EDUCATION

GramTel has proactive approach to safeguarding universities' data systems

Nothing is more valuable to your educational mission than the availability of data in your Courseware Management and ERP systems: information about students, classes, grades, degrees, alumni, donors, applicants, faculty, staff, and payables and receivables.

With a list that long, it is imperative to have it all safeguarded by experts who can customize business continuity plans and support services – experienced consultants from GramTel who use a proven methodology to develop a thorough and executable plan, and seasoned IT specialists who see it through to implementation.

GramTel has guided some of the largest colleges and universities throughout the country in their decision to use an off-site backup facility for their important data. Regardless of the school’s size, a workable – and affordable – plan can be put in place. All successful plans start with an assessment of a school’s current IT situation, and that is where our process begins.

Business Continuity Planning

A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) offers college and university personnel the information they need to assess the risk of operational interruption, including any financial exposure that may occur, and offers a proactive/preemptive Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that anticipates and reacts quickly to a disaster.

The BIA addresses higher education’s IT issues as identified in the 2006 Current Issues survey conducted by Educause. The list includes:

• Security and identity management
• Funding IT
• Administrative/ERP/information systems
• Disaster recovery and business continuity
• Faculty development, support and training
• Infrastructure (network infrastructure and equipment)
• Strategic planning
• Governance, organization and leadership
• E-learning/distributed teaching and learning
• Web systems and services

After the Business Impact Analysis addresses these issues, our experienced consultants develop a thorough and executable plan by using a proven and tested methodology, working hand-in-hand with your technical staff to plan, develop and deploy end-to-end solutions.

IT staff at a prestigious technical college can attest first-hand to the validity of GramTel’s planning process. When it became apparent that writing a thorough and complete plan was more difficult and complex than they had originally envisioned, they called on GramTel to make sure that their issues, as well as other college business and administrative units’ requirements and constraints were identified and addressed in the plan.

The IT representative was grateful for the knowledge and experience that GramTel brought to their situation. He said, “They identified critical systems and included step-by-step, realistic procedures for testing the plan. We know now that our integrated application suite is as safe as it can be.”

Disaster Recovery Services

As the IT Director of another one of GramTel’s university clients puts it, “We never really had a disaster recovery plan to follow. Then we asked ourselves, ‘What would we do if…?’ and decided a proactive plan was called for.”

If your Business Continuity Plan calls for disaster recovery, GramTel is ready with co-location, or backup data centers, for critical servers, supported by expert technical staff. We host your data in low-risk secondary markets (but ones that are easily accessible) that are “off the grid.”

Our “hot sites” safeguard your IT systems in the event of disasters and/or emergency events with Tier III data center space for replacement hardware and network connections, and a robust network that allows remote users to connect to the replacement servers. These servers are yours and yours alone – not shared with multiple customers. Technical expertise is maintained at our hot sites by personnel who monitor your systems around the clock.

In addition, our Service Level Agreements (SLAs) ensure the security and performance that your operations require.

Managed Services

As many IT professionals can attest, working with and upgrading enterprise resource planning software (ERP) is often a daunting task. Building and maintaining a single program that serves people in admissions, as well as those in finance, is difficult at best. GramTel wrote the ERP plan for systems such as SCT Banner, DataTel, Jenzabar, SAP, Oracle and others, and understands the ins and outs of using an integrated approach.

Demands on IT systems are on the increase. They must be reliable, secure and flexible in equal measure. But operating the technology to manage your school’s IT infrastructure can be a drain on valuable resources. GramTel provides you with advanced IT capabilities for a complete range of managed services that keep your data always available to you, regardless of any on-site problems you may experience.

• Monitoring and Reporting. Affordable 24/7 monitoring and incident management for your infrastructure (network, facilities, systems).
• Data Storage Management. Replication and storage infrastructure to minimize exposure to risk and with rapid recovery access. Our safe site offers a Storage Area Network (SAN), Media Vaulting to house media tapes, and our proprietary G-Vault methodology where data is encrypted and transferred to a vaulting location.
• Network Infrastructure. Includes the procurement and professional management of your routers, firewalls and switches. We provide a single point of contact to track, resolve, maintain and manage your network, including designing, deploying and operating.
• Managed Security. Educational institutions have unique assets to protect, with different levels of risk and different levels of risk tolerance. GramTel works with you to determine the right mix of managed security services and technologies to protect you, your data and systems, while you conduct Web-connected business activities. Our managed security services include:
  • Managed Firewall to protect your network, hosted equipment and applications from the ever-present threats on the Internet
  • Managed Virtual Private Network for a secure link between your network and the GramTel data center, with the benefit of securely sharing information worldwide
  • Managed Spam/Viruses to stop unwanted e-mail before it reaches your servers

In the end, having your business-critical data safe and available is paramount. Beyond that, however, is the professional service and attention to detail that you will experience with GramTel. As one satisfied university director of network computing and telecommunications testified,

The entire experience was great. GramTel worked with our IT staff to implement a plan tailored specifically to our situation. Key to the entire process was the very act of identifying the problem/solution component of the plan. They [GramTel] understood what we needed, of course, but they also gave me the ‘tools’ I needed to present the plan to the administration. The people we worked with were professional and responsive to our needs. They understood our team’s desire for a thorough review of all alternative solutions and made sure everyone on our team supported the selected plan. The entire experience was rewarding.

Contact us today and let us show you how we can provide you with the plan tailored to your specific situation.