University of Canberra braces for change with Windows 11, cloud shift

The University of Canberra is preparing to transition 2500 staff and academics to Windows 11 as it begins a 10-year “digital masterplan”.

The university has completed a pilot of 50 staff members and is now bringing the software update to 2500 members of staff.

Speaking to iTnews during Nutanix Next in Barcelona, University of Canberra associate director of vendor and operations Justin Mason said the upgrade would bring "security enhancements" to the desktop environment.

“There is a balance: we’re doing this to protect university assets, and [staff] as well. But the academics do at times have a valid reason for needing a bit more freedom for their research," Mason said.

Planned security changes include application whitelisting, enabling the use of biometrics for device security and adhering to the Essential Eight maturity model.

The upgrade to Windows 11 forms part of the university’s $30-million ,10-year digital masterplan, which will see 68 initiatives undertaken in the first three years, 27 of which will take place in 2024.

“A lot of universities are stepping up their digital transformations because it is all about the student experience,” Mason said.

“You want to get to get the word of mouth out that the university is, for example, easy to apply to. They have all the tools online and they don’t need to go into a building to get what they need.”

Mason broke down the 10-year masterplan into three phases: stabilise, integrate and thrive.

“The first phase is looking at what we have now and decommissioning and consolidating a lot of duplication,” Mason explained.

With the consolidation complete, the University of Canberra's IT team will begin planning its cloud strategy, through which it aims to select a primary public cloud provider.

The university's IT environment comprises two on-premises data centres; Nutanix AHV – which functions as its private cloud; and a “little bit” of space in the three main public cloud providers: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

According to Mason, the university always had a cloud framework, but this is the first time it will have a formal strategy in place.

“Doing the cloud strategy has enabled us to take a look at where all our workloads sit,” he said.

“We have a large portion on our private cloud, Nutanix; a large portion on SaaS, but our public cloud use is very small.”

No VMware concerns

The University of Canberra is perhaps a rare example, said Mason, of a higher education institution that isn’t on VMware.

Others, including Sydney’s Macquarie University and Gold Coast’s Bond University, have recently outlined their efforts to exit a VMware environment.

However, fortunately for Mason, the university moved entirely from VMware onto Nutanix AHV in 2018, long before VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom and a subsequent licence fee hike.

“With Broadcom taking over VMware, [other universities] are now in a tricky situation,” said Mason.

“We have plenty [of worries] at the university, but at least this isn’t one of them.”

Before the transition, the University of Canberra ran a “bulletproof” environment of VMware and Nutanix, which contained its workloads, major corporate systems and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).

However, in Mason’s words: “Then Nutanix came along and released its own hypervisor, Nutanix AHV”.

“We were sceptical, but VMware was costing us extra money and it wasn’t exactly cheap.

“We then started the migration to AHV from VMware. We were lucky we were able to do that many years ago, as there are many universities with large VMware installations."

According to Mason, the AHV setup has given the IT team a “single pane of glass” to work from and the flexibility to add GPU to the Nutanix instances as and when researchers need it.

“We’re a small IT team at a small university with an outsourced IT team,” he added. “We were looking for that single pane of glass with VMware and Nutanix on top to support it. Nutanix made it somewhat easier."

Eleanor Dickinson attended Nutanix Next in Barcelona as a guest of Nutanix.