Top three trends at EDUCAUSE 2023

More than 7,000 IT professionals, academic technology professionals, and higher education campus stakeholders attended this year’s EDUCAUSE conference in Chicago, October 9-12.  A total of 293 exhibitors had a booth presence there and interacted with attendees.  

As attendees made their way through the conference, these were the top three trends that dominated conversations at EDUCAUSE 2023:

1. Enhance campus security: Both physical and cybersecurity concerns are uppermost in higher education leader’s minds today. How can a campus help to ensure student, faculty and staff safety? Many leading colleges believe that by using smart cameras and environmental sensors they can increase their capabilities to visually monitor campus activity. This may help them to protect faculty, students, staff and physical assets by creating smart spaces with threshold alerts for environmental conditions. As campus IT leaders look to shield their networks from attacks, the nature of cybersecurity is changing. With more applications running in the cloud and users accessing resources from any location, college and university networks may no longer be protected by strong perimeter defenses. Institutions need modern defenses that extend the network edge to each user and application. For campus cybersecurity concerns, a major trending topic is Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA). In a zero-trust approach, all network users are authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated before gaining access to data and applications, whether they’re located on or off campus. Under a ZTNA approach, campus IT staff have full visibility into the devices on their network — and they’re constantly tracking these devices. This means that IT staff should be able to identify attacks or anomalies nearly instantly as they occur, accelerating the response time.
2. Unburden IT teams: In recent years campus IT departments have been overloaded with implementing and supporting a growing number of technologies. Campus IT staff must ensure these diverse systems work together seamlessly, and somehow optimize connectivity to ensure these technologies are working optimally. With each new system that is added, there is rarely a proportional increase in IT resources. The IT departments at many institutions are chronically understaffed, affecting their ability to integrate and support modern technologies. There’s mounting interest in the higher education community in discovering how managed services can help institutions meet these challenges and lessen the overload on IT staff. With managed services, campus IT departments can keep up with rapidly evolving connectivity needs without investing in costly equipment. They can extend the capabilities of their IT staff, allowing team members to focus on more strategic priorities. And they can achieve predictable costs, making it easier to budget for IT needs.
3. Enrich student experiences: Today’s college students are the first true digital natives. They expect to be able to access digital content from a variety of devices wherever they are, and whenever they want that content. To satisfy that expectation, institutions of higher learning are focusing on providing uninterrupted connectivity across campus so students can pursue their education in classrooms, dorm rooms, libraries, the student union or wherever they may be on campus. Solutions exist that can ensure that universities are delivering a strong high-capacity WiFi connection campus-wide, and provide service where your staff, students and faculty need it. And when their noses are not buried in their digital educational content, there are modern TV streaming services available, which enable students to watch live programming and on-demand content anytime, anywhere. Another digitally-based opportunity for enriching student experiences student is seen in the growth of esports at colleges and universities. As an example of the sort of impact esports is having,  when D’Youville University started its push for full accreditation as a university (after over a century of being D’Youville College), esports helped make that a reality. By making esports a varsity activity, they expanded their sports curriculum and thus raised the school’s NCAA standing from Division III to Division II. 

Hope we connected with you at EDUCAUSE 2023

Along with demos of Spectrum Enterprise solutions, attendees took a break and played some esports at our booth against a D’Youville University varsity team member. Our Higher Education Network specialists demonstrated how we can partner with you to safeguard learning environments using our network management solution, complete with built-in firewall, unified threat management, smart cameras, environmental sensors and cloud-based network security.

Find out how we’ve partnered with hundreds of institutions nationwide to create technology-rich environments that accelerate student success.