Top Tier universities make substantial economic contributions to the nation. Since 1980, they’ve helped launch more than 5,000 startup companies, according to the Association of University Technology Managers, and their patents have helped create 4 million jobs.
For UNLV, becoming a Top Tier institution means fostering a creative and innovative environment for faculty and students to do research and make discoveries. To define its journey, UNLV developed a comprehensive, data-driven plan.
“Data is the driving force at all universities,” said John Nicpon, Manager of Systems Engineering at UNLV. “Data enables innovation everywhere on campus. Our data must be hyper-available to achieve Top Tier status.”
“Data loss would be devastating,” Nicpon said. “It could set researchers back years, causing them to lose funding. It could prevent students from submitting papers and graduating on time. It could even be life-threatening.”
UNLV operates a medical clinic and a pharmacy. Data loss could interfere with patient treatment and prescriptions. It could also lead to a breach in HIPAA compliance, resulting in fines. Maintaining compliance with state and federal laws can be challenging for universities.
“Compliance is part of hyper-availability,” Nicpon said. “We were spending too much time and money on IT solutions that didn’t deliver on either.”
Nicpon and his colleagues meet the computing needs of more than 40,000 users that comprise the UNLV campus community.
“UNLV is like a small city,” he said. “We needed to step up our game.”
