Because one of the tenets of higher education is the free flow and exchange of ideas and information, college campus networks try to remain as open and as accessible as possible. As a result, many modern college campuses have grown into vibrant hubs of emerging technology and high-level learning, combined with a young, dedicated (and occasionally mischievous) user community. To that effect, these schools have had to strike a balance between openness of their network and data and the security that protects it.

“For a college campus, one of the biggest concerns is around security,” said Patrick Williams (pictured), information technology infrastructure architect at North Carolina State University. “So there’s a mandate, or desire, probably as part of the academic culture, to be as open as possible, because the goal is to exchange ideas and to share resources between the university and across our set of institutions.”

Furthermore, security at NCSU has been been heightened in recent months to new protocols, such as two-factor authentication, and the university is creating and implementing a data classification system that will “grade” data based on its sensitivity. This classification system will decide what level of security is ultimately provided for that data, while keeping that data accessible to everyone who has a legitimate need for it, Williams explained.

Williams spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live-streaming studio, during Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

He discussed the methodology NCSU is using to heighten the data security of its on-campus network while still balancing that security with accessibility in an effort to comply with the university’s policy of openness and free flow of information. Williams also discussed which Dell EMC products are helping the university examine the data it is already collecting and finding more ways to make better use it.

Extracting value from data evaluation and extrapolation

A common thread that many organizations, NCSU included, are seeing play out is the push to extract ever-increasing value out of their IT departments, year after year, with virtually no increase in their budget in more recent years. This has driven large companies and institutions with a highly dynamic IT environment to use artificial intelligence or predictive analytics in innovative, cutting-edge solutions, such as Dell EMC’s CloudIQ, which more accurately examines and tracks where the organization is currently and where it will be at certain points of time in the future.

“Cost is everything for us. Our budgets have been flat for the past three years, but the demand for growth in capacity and existing environments and the demand for new services is ongoing,” Williams said. “What we’ve been able to do is to work really hard on assessing our resources.”

And it appears that that hard work has paid off, both in the short term and in the long term.

“We implemented CloudIQ a year ago when it was first announced to get a kind of a long-term view of our environment and kind of track our growth,” Williams stated. “And that has enabled us to put the right data in the appropriate tier and be able to maximize our investment. And that’s really helped us be able to continue to grow our environments as we move forward.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell EMC World. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE