By Ryan Audus, VP of Product Strategy, TouchNet

Hosted and cloud computing is much more than offloading onto “someone else’s computer,” it is a different and improved way of computing with substantial benefits to higher education institutions.

Hosted computing means a provider is managing servers and related services, which relieves your budget of hardware and some associated costs. Cloud computing is a type of hosted computing that goes a step further.

Cloud includes not only servers off premise, it provides a reliable and scalable environment for solutions to operate, increases security, and offers integration and configuration of solutions that help staff better perform tasks, handle data, and coordinate operations across campus.

Applied to campus ID management systems, hosted and cloud solutions increase savings, security, and efficiency when compared to traditional on-premise systems.

Savings

Hosted and cloud computing relieves a campus of the capital costs of on-premise equipment. Campuses no longer have to spend money purchasing, housing, maintaining, and upgrading servers and other hardware. Staff can minimize spending time on managing and securing data centers and performing network oversight. Everyone experiences less downtime and thus less costs from lost productivity.

Your spending is also made more efficient because you can purchase the solutions, servers, and support that you need and have it configured to match your situation. You don’t pay for things you won’t use and what you do pay for fits like a glove, increasing efficiency.

Another benefit associated with configuration is scalability. As needs change on your campus, you can expand, contract, and re-shape your hosted solutions and their support more easily and quickly than if they were on-premise.

Efficiency

With hosted and cloud-based ID management solutions, everything is in the same environment, “speaks the same language”, and provides the benefits of easier integration and implementation. No more legacy products that don’t connect. Instead, your solutions work together with ease and speed.

Integrated campus ID solutions generate usable data more readily and in real time because data continuously syncs across the system. Data analytics are presented in dashboards and digestible reports, accelerating the process of discovering insights and obstacles and improving your services and operations.

Upgrades are easier to implement, leading to more frequent rollouts, and because you’re on the most recent version of software, you experience better performance and faster fixes. Not to mention the improved capabilities by having access to the newest features as they become available.

Especially helpful for campus ID management is the ability for remote and reduced administration. Staff can work anywhere, anytime and execute a wide range of tasks that connect to any point on campus. Often only a single administrator is needed to perform these tasks, making staffing more efficient.

Security

The security of the system is improved in hosted and cloud environments. By reducing physical implementation and maintenance, institutions can concentrate resources on securing their ID management system. These environments have built-in disaster prevention to increase security and server redundancy to provide immediate and secure access to back-ups.

Data is made more secure, too, with personal and payment data processed, transmitted, and stored by PCI-compliant solutions. And most providers offer access to a dedicated test environment, enhancing the ability to experiment and develop more secure solutions.

The security of the campus and its residents is strengthened as well. Integrated campus ID solutions expand and sharpen security because all locks and doors are in the same system and under the same control, allowing for quick decisions and precise execution.

Unified technology provides better and more encompassing data, giving administrators the big picture of many activities across the entire campus as well as the fine details of a single door’s usage, which ultimately leads to improved security.

To learn more about how hosted cloud card solutions can help deliver savings, security, and efficiency to your campus, download our infographic, Reasons to Move to OneCard VIP.