Hello everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining us. I hope you're all doing well and staying safe. I am Venu Judi Metla, I will be your host for today. I have diverse experience across strategy, sales, delivery and consulting over the last 20 years. I have spent a significant part of my career establishing trusted relationships with customers and driving transformative initiatives across sectors and markets, largely across UK and Europe in my current role as. The head of Cloud Business for you? OK, I advise Cxos on how cloud technologies can enable business transformation outcomes and how such journeys need to be navigated by the enterprises. So in today's world, higher education institutions are now investing in next generation technology solutions to transform academia, students and tutors experience where properly designed and managed the adoption of cloud computing can provide. The following measurable benefits for universities. So it could be on the lines of on demand flexibility to turn up and down the compute power to match the demand throughout the academic year. Beat from a registrations and clearing perspective where the demand is quite high and there could be troughs of demand during the school year. So managing this flexibility is one of the key messages measurable benefit. Swift provisioning and decommissioning of secure environments for research programs and transformative initiatives. And not only that, higher levels of confidence in data security, coupled with the significant cost savings compared to fixed data center environments is one of an integral part of the benefits structure. The cloud technology offers improved accessibility at lower cost while driving connectivity between educational institutions and its students. Institutions can also benefit from the ecosystem play in cloud, thereby enabling digital transformation and innovation across teaching, learning and research. So in today's virtual event, key leaders from this sector will discuss how the role of cloud modernization and academia, and addressing questions such as. The What are the steps to adapt in a cloud First university approach? For example, what are the measurable benefits of cloud transformation for education? How can senior leaders prepare themselves for the migration to the cloud? So before we begin, let's take a quick look at the virtual event platform that we have got. So at the bottom of your screen, you'll see a row of widget icons. These control the various windows, which are resizable and removable by clicking on the arrows in the top right corner. So feel free to move them around to get the most out of your desktop. For better experience during a panel discussion, you may want to maximize the video window to a full screen. We will be answering some of your questions as part of the Q&A session, so please use the Q&A box below to submit your questions. Please remember, you do not need to wait until the end of each presentation to submit your questions. You can do that at any point of time. Also, please be sure to fill out our event survey. We can do. You can do this at any point during the event. Finally, in today's virtual world, it's not uncommon to experience a technical glitch. So if your screen buffers or freezes, just refresh your browser page. In most cases that results common technical issues. You can also use our Q&A box if you need any further help. Now I would like to introduce our keynote speaker for today, Danny Atias, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer and Business School. Listed as the most transformational and disruptive technology leader in the UK by CIO in 2020. Yeah, and he is currently the Chief Digital and Information Officer at London Business School, accountable for delivering the school's digital data and Technology Strategy. Danny is passionate about utilizing innovative technology and data to enrich the lives of their students throughout the lifelong learning. He was previously Global CIO for Grassroots Group. Danny is also the creator and host of a podcast called Saunder Ship in which he has conversations with people. Who are making a positive impact on the society and the environment with the objective to discover how they found their purpose and with the hope to inspire others to follow their own paths. Over to you, Danny. So I think it would be really useful if I just took a moment to talk a little bit about my own journey into the cloud and my experience of understanding how the use of cloud technologies is different from traditional technologies and how that has impacted mindset, how it's impacted the way we lead, the way we organize our teams and the way we think about things in general. My background historically was retail, but over the last few years I've been working in a not-for-profit in a charity, a blood cancer charity, and the last five years was focused very much on the digital transformation of that business. The foundations of that charity or business were very traditional, so they were very legacy. A lot of the software was built in house. It was built in a traditional method. And by traditional I mean monolithic, I mean tightly coupled. I mean done as a block. Big project and then left alone for several years until it was in a complete state of disrepair. There would need to be completely replaced and hopefully for our listeners. That's not an uncommon situation historically of how systems were developed. Moving to the cloud has meant is and I use the cloud you know incredibly generically from infrastructure as a service, platforms as a service, software as a service and API driven functions on data and the like. So the kind of a huge spread that is cloud. And what Cloud has brought to the equation is firstly, we stop building monoliths, so we start modularizing functions and we integrate them really sensibly. So you can change one function and not have to change the other. So that allows you to do continuous improvements and continuous maintenance, another fundamental change. And again, I'm not talking about technology change, but really approach project management and mindset. Change. Is about continuous improvement. So not saying, OK, you've got your shot to do this project and the project has a beginning and an end, but the project is really the implementation of the minimum viable product. And then you continue to invest and you continue to use the resources. The world's changing, customers needs are changing, technology is changing. So the idea that we can build a system, leave it running for 10 years. And then come back and change it 10 years later means we are we're missing nine years worth of innovation and change. I think ultimately customers are now used to that kind of service, user centric design. They're used to cloud based always on solutions and then so businesses and not just consumer businesses but businesses need to start to develop in a very different way. So from a leadership perspective, the first thing and probably the most difficult thing is getting that mindset change both within the technology function. But also across the business. So for a senior leader across an organization, it's about helping them understand what these changes mean to the way that they implement technology, use technology and interact with their customers. But equally hard, again depending on the maturity of your team is getting your team on that basis, because invariably historical teams managing legacy systems are going to be in this spiral of firefighting. Everything is bespoke, everything is really hard to do and really hard to fix and they don't have time to kind of stop, think and breathe. So ultimately between the influence on the business and the influence on the team. You need to be able to get people to the point where A you can reduce the overheads of legacy and be you're able to start to introduce those new cloud based technologies. Sorry, we are able to introduce those new cloud based technologies so that eventually you get into a rhythm. Now that's really hard to do. It's much easier to say than it is to do and the objective, the key is to find a space in your organization where. The opportunity is there. You know the right mindset is there in the business. You've got some people in your team that kind of get it, and there's an opportunity where you can have a big digital impact without a huge piece of foundational work because then you can demonstrate the right behaviors. I think the other thing also to think about is. The landscape of the people that work with those technologies is different because as you move towards low code, no code services, you don't necessarily need every single person in your organization, in your technology function to be coders or developers or detailed business analysts that write highly specific specifications. You're now at a point where what you need are people who are very much focused on the customer, the customer's journey, the customer needs, and the business. Needs, but not just in a silo, but across the whole of the organization. So what we what we need to do to that is change the way technology is created within a business and how they harness that. And that comes from a lot of different things. One of them absolutely key is diversity, and that means diversity of thought from diversity of background and gender and ethnicity and culture, so that you've got people thinking in different ways. Coming up with different solutions, but that only works if you break down the hierarchy and you create a you create a psychologically safe environment in which to work in so that people can challenge each other. People can come up with different ideas and they can experiment and they can be comfortable with. Calling out a failure of their own, or helping someone else with a failure of theirs. All of those components are necessary to harness those cloud technologies and evolve into this digital world. So those are the kind of the fundamentals around that culture. Also, I genuinely think the best people you can get into your business are the people that are already in your business. Sure, you need to buy in specialist skill sets and you need to enhance training, but if there are people across your organization that already understand the organization, they're already bought into the culture. They're very passionate about what your organization does. And then also ultimately as many individuals are looking to grow and develop themselves, then this is a way of harnessing those opportunities. And one way that I've done that both in my previous charity, Anthony Nolan, but also in my new role at London Business School, actually starting starting this week, is. Using the apprenticeship levy, which is a UK specific thing, but the apprenticeship levy allows you to retrain members of staff as well as bring in new people into your organization. We're doing that very specifically to start with, on data literacy. We feel that if you get the data literacy right, you get you start to get an understanding and a respect of the core data. You create both curiosity in people's minds, but also the ability to then take that curiosity and start to look for answers in the data and join things up. You're really on the way to cleaning up your data, understanding the data that's missing and ultimately driving better quality decisions. So we're putting. 5% of our entire workforce through data literacy training and that's a 13 to 14 month training course. It's not, it's not two days or two weeks, this is one day a week for the next 13 to 14 months. That shows our ability, our intent to invest in those people and also it helps them raise their own game by taking their company specific knowledge and then these new technical skills and curiosity mindset and then off the back of that we can really start to. Leverage different cloud services and deliver new solutions. Thank you very much, Danny for sharing your valuable inputs. And without further due, I would like to introduce our esteemed speakers for the first panel discussion. Our first panelist for today is Fraser Muir, Global Director of Information Services for Harriet Watt University. Fraser has 25 plus years of experience in higher education, technology and Information Services. He's passionate about service delivery across the whole higher education information spectrum, and most recently he has taken up the role of Global Director for Information Services at Harriet Watt University, which is spread across 5 campuses and three continents. The university has pursued a cloud first approach for its enterprise systems in support to its mission to create and exchange knowledge that benefits society. Welcome, Fraser. Hello everybody, My name is Fraser Muir. I'm Global director of Information Services at Harriet Watt University in Edinburgh. Thank you, Fraser. Our next panelist is Paddy Norton. Paddy Norton is the CEO of Edu Campus Services, IT provider of IT shared services to the higher education sector in Ireland. Previously, he held several seniority leadership roles with the global limited companies and public sector organizations. He has a wealth of experience in the leadership of large scale business transformation programs and with the provisioning of shared Information Services. His focus is on delivery of quality shared business solutions through the adoption of cloud technologies incorporating software as a service best practices. He considers adherence of information security, regulatory compliance, and strategic risk. Management has critical SuccessFactors. It's a pleasure to have Paddy on board. Welcome Paddy. Hello everybody. I'm paddy Nelson. I'm chief executive of eduCampus Services. We're a shared service provider of Mis. applications to the higher education sector in Ireland. Thank you, paddy. Next we have Malcolm Whitehouse. Malcolm is currently the CEO of Greater Manchester NHS shared Services, providing IT and digital services for the primary care general practice across Greater Manchester, and he has joined them in December 2020. Prior to this, Malcolm was CIO for the University of Manchester, where he led a significant IT and digital transformation over the course of nearly five years. And compassing a student experience platform, a research lifecycle management platform and analytics platform, and modern infrastructure with service integration capabilities. He has over 30 years of experience in IT business change and transformation gained in a range of different organizations. This background includes digital transformation, IT transformation, strategy and architecture, coupled with leading major change programs in the private sector public sector. Thank you for joining us. Malcolm. Hi everybody, i am malcolm White House. I'm currently the CIO in the health services about five years. I was a server for the University of Manchester and I still do some consulting and higher education as part of my role today. OK. Rounding out the panel today is Peter smillie, Cloud and Data Analytics Evangelist from TCS. Peter has over 25 years of experience using technology to drive business value within and beyond the enterprise ecosystem. He is a hands on leader throughout the transformation life cycle to achieve the strategic business and technical outcomes. Peter currently leads cloud data and analytics customer engagement for several sectors including higher education at TCS. Prior to joining PCs, Peter spent the majority of his career in BT PLC laterally as Principal Architect for Cloud Data and Analytics. Welcome Peter. Hi everyone. I'm Peter smillie. I work with TCS as a Cloud Data and Analytics Evangelist. Prior to joining TCS, I spent over 25 years working for mostly BT, British Telecom and lately I was Principal Architect for cloud Data and Analytics. I'm really delighted to be. A lot of this very important topic and I'm looking forward to exploring the many facets of the role of the cloud in the education sector. Thank you, Peter, for the introduction. Now it's time to get into our first panel discussion. It is about how can colleges and universities benefit from cloud first strategy and how should they go about their cloud modernization journey. So I would like to start with a question saying why a cloud first university approach? Fraser, do you want to say something about it? Absolutely. I think for certainly for Harriet Walton and for my experience within education, there's a couple of strands around which universities can leverage the cloud. So the first is obviously in the realm of for example, software as a service, platform as a service where you can utilize expertise from other companies to be able to essentially pass over the responsibility of running enterprise systems in the cloud And then you gain all sorts of. Advantages around handling updates and security and so on does have some caveats and no doubt we'll get to talking about them later. The other area that certainly we're leveraging is in around virtual infrastructure. So the ability for us to extend our on campus, our on premise high performance computing for example into the cloud for when we need additional boost or additional resources. So we take jobs that would. Be running on our on campus infrastructure and if they need a boost, if they need more memory or more cores, we can easily push them out to the cloud and gain that elasticity. So I think those are certainly the areas that we are certainly utilizing and trying to leverage the benefits from. Malcolm, do you have any thoughts on that? I'd certainly echo the points made. One of the things that we focused on in Manchester was a cloud first capability and this was for three reasons. I mean one absolutely why should we use our resources to feed and water a data center anymore? We don't really need to at this point in time and we'd be better off using them to add more value. To the institution as a whole, either through more automation or using technologies that improve the student and academic experience. And certainly one of the things that we did at Manchester from a research perspective, we needed to run a particularly complex piece of work regarding 10s of thousands of calculations on the magnetic. Capabilities of Electrons as part of research. If we'd run it on our in-house HPC computer clusters, it would have stopped everybody else from working. Not only that, but by doing a bit of reengineering on the code we managed to get it up and running in a well known cloud service organizations capability and ran the research in two weeks. If we had to build it from scratch, it would have taken 130 elapsed days. That's a massive difference in terms of what we could do with the cloud in that circumstance. Now truly, truly can't agree more and on those lines here see one of the questions that I have is how relevant is this capability of? Fast provisioning from an upside as well as downside perspective is relevant for universities. Any thoughts on it, Peter? It's critical. In fact, I would say that it's the foundation of the whole business case to move to the cloud and that's what the cloud offers. The ability to scale up almost immediately and on demand and pay as you go gives you the flexibility to manage your costs. So it's Malcolm was saying you don't have to spend a fortune or time. A's know building something on your own IT estate also the cloud gives you a lot of native tools that you can pick off the shelf and on top of that you've got digital marketplaces. All the hyper scalers have literally thousands of third party offerings and that talk to so many different business cases, but the agility things is probably the one that's really key. Speaking as one has come from a corporate world, agility is a thing that everyone strives for and an increasingly competitive market. You have to be able to turn things around very quickly, from the point of coming up with an idea to delivering a sailing and billing for a product. True. And that brings to me the thought of while while there are many higher education institutions that are embarking on this journey on the back of the pandemic, it has definitely accelerated what sort of mindset shift is required to be able to motivate them better or that that's an interesting perspective from my side. I'm keen to hear. Malcolm, you have any thoughts on it? Yes, it's a really interesting question because the. What you've you've got in a university is a culture of expertise. So people like to have that knowledge and kind of keep it to themselves while they're doing things that are important to them and then share the outcome of that as they go forward. And I think what Cloud gives you is that is a much more collaborative environment for working together. And it takes away the need for that knowledge expertise. So for example, some of the things that we used were interactive development environments. Whether that's in AWS, Google, Azure doesn't really matter. They all have an idea of some sort. What that does is it gives people who need to use compute capability. That are not necessarily computer experts the ability to do that and do that in collaboration with others. So we use that sort of tooling to enable people who are doing chemistry and engineering degrees to use compute capability. That normally they'd have to go and find an expert to do it for them and it slows them down significantly. So it's a big capability shift for people to think IT expertise is not the domain of IT experts. IT expertise is the domain of everybody. And that's the sort of mind shift that I think we need to see to make this really. Bring bring out the sort of value that we're talking about at the moment. And indeed, I think to have that mindset shift is one of the key facet of the journey. paddy, you have something to add to that? I know I think it's interesting to hear some of the reasons why universities adopt cloud just for people's information and energy campus services. Our role as a shared service provider is to provide Ms. applications to the higher education sector in Ireland. So we provide 5 MIS systems, your classic MIS systems, finance, HR and payroll, library management, student management and student credentials. And in 2015 we were. Established to modernize the portfolio of applications and really at that time. Know carrying out market analysis, it was clear that the application providers were on a journey to cloud. So really we were, we decided we would follow that trajectory and we would leave rage the adoption of cloud capability for someone to get the benefits as articulated by Malcolm and Frasier earlier. You know to have that secure environment to have it scalable, have it available, have it always on tap. And then to create that innovative platform for universities. So we've been on that journey and now we're in a stage where four of the applications are fully deployed on cloud based software as a service offerings and the 5th, the children record system is just going live at the moment. So it's been certainly a change in mindset and changing culture across our universities. In the early days there was concerns about moving to cloud environments. Not having know how the posting in your own data center etcetera, but I think as the as cloud has grown, the adoption of cloud has grown across universities that's less of an issue now and the fact that such a secure environment. That is scalable, it provides that platform that brings the innovative solutions to support the overall strategy of the universities. Yeah, thank you. Pretty another question that I wanted to add on similar lines is what sort of readiness from a senior stakeholders are happening in the universities as well as building their own teams to be able to take up this cloud adoption journey. How is that design happening? I think it's really a focus on digital transformation to support overall university strategic initiatives in Ireland as well we have. Significant changes across higher education in that thirteen of our institutes of technology are merging to become technology universities and that's from in itself has, I suppose. For. And required universities to consider their future, their digital transformation and how they're going to leverage their digital capability to provide greater access and greater support to researchers and support your overall ambitions as universities. So really it's aligning a digital transformation strategy with the overall strategy at the university. So I think we've been helped in that from that perspective in Ireland in that the focus on establishing those technology universities is. Very much supported by central governments, by the Department of Education and they interned in, they're looking at the capability required to operate as universities in particular to support researchers and that's where we come in then to provide cloud based capability and cloud based services. So I think it's to bring it together together of those initiatives really and that focus has strategic level. So Fraser, I'm sure as part of Harriet Vet, being across the globe in three continents, how do you organise your team is probably key for cloud adoption journeys, Any reflections? Yes. So I think there's been some really interesting points raised for me. What we are seeing within the Harriet, what technology support team is perhaps a move away from running the infrastructure to helping and enabling our researchers, our teachers, our educators and our students use the technologies that are now available to them. That may be a blend of some on campus, but a lot of cloud based technologies. And the cloud, the Ed tech sector for cloud offerings is massively expanded over the last couple of years and that comes with some caveats we're seeing there, if you like. The democratization of Ed tech and the way that that's delivered over the cloud has huge advantages but also comes with some real risks, particularly those risks around privacy and data protection and the appropriate use of some of those technologies. But nevertheless, I think the. Benefits are massive if we can do it in a kind of controlled and managed way. I wanted to bring up the point around digital capabilities as well, digital skills and capabilities. So we're needing to work quite closely with particularly researchers, but also our digital educators to be more aware of some of the technologies and how to use them and again supporting those technology teams away from running that infrastructure to helping and enabling and being perhaps acting more as a consultant rather than a technician. Interesting. Last few questions as part of this particular topic, I also believe that most of the education institutions are sort of always in cash crunch. So how relevant is the shift of our commercial incentives perspective? CapEx to OpEx shift is an interesting facet probably the universities are looking at. Peter, you have any thoughts on it? Yes, absolutely. This is a question that comes up in every sector and how to save money. And there's a number of ways to look at the economics of it all. One very good example is shared services, so. In the education sector, everyone has HR, they have ERP, they have payroll, they've procurement. I do believe that the cloud offers an opportunity to perhaps pull some of those shared services across institutions. I perhaps billing some of the administrative services. I understand it costs. Just under £3000 per student. To cover admin costs, I most institutions tend to do unilaterally, but the cloud does offer the. Potential for having a shared service where everyone can use the same tools, the same frameworks, the same governance processes they manage, these sort of foundational aspects of running an institution. Other things you can do is you can pull your license costs and so if you have a lot of institutions all coming together and using the cloud and talking to the hyperscalers as a whole, that gives you a lot more buying power and leverage with the hyper scalers on volume. You've obviously got OpEx starts to play a role in the cloud, less upfront costs and more pay as you go. That's attractive to corporates and educational institutions and objects being much more favourable financially. I and there's plenty of other. Plenty of other options around economics, but the important thing is you've got to think about first and foremost, what am I trying to do? So rather than take it from a position of or the cloud looks good, we should probably do something you it really has to be driven by use case by business case by scenario. Then you start to look at what the cloud can offer you and that would be one recommendation that I would make. I was an interesting fight when I was doing some reading for this. I was thinking about facilities in the state management. Apparently there's a Metropolitan University has 420 buildings alone. That must place a huge burden on universities. But in the current model and although we know it's shifting to blended, but in the current physical learning model, that means that the institution is really limited in its capacity. It can only take on so many students. But where the cloud helps us, that offers the implementation of a more blended model, thus increasing the revenue for institutions as they take on more students and a blended form, I mean I could go and. About the economics and it was an interesting one about the shared services. I know everyone will have their own opinion on shared services and if my mental arithmetics correct. I. There's literally hundreds of millions to be saved if institutions pulled their approach. I. Less unilaterally, if I could put it that way. Yeah. And any anyone wants to come in with respect to what sort of commercial frameworks are available in the market for universities to sort of adapt this CapEx to OpEx shift? You. I think the big, the big challenge is that the model that universities tend to work to at the moment is based on a very traditional capital investment and then swept the asset over over a period of time. Usually, and Frasier might have a view on this as well, usually a little bit beyond the end of their normal life. And creating an overhead of technical debt that you really want to do without. So yeah, there's a mindset shift from a finance perspective to build the big case. You know, I agree with Peter about shared services and it was a subject that I had a lot of discussion with the Russell Group about while I was at Manchester. But it's really hard to get traction because they tend to still want to do their own thing, predominantly because they feel they're different. And they're differences outweigh the potential value of a shared service. There's a big case to be made for that. But I think this element of infrastructure as a service, which is what cloud really is predominantly, there are applications et cetera, but I think that service capability in doing it jointly. Gives you the opportunity to build resource capability and knowledge to do things once rather than many times. And as you start to see that work, then people will start to buy into that as a capability. But I think the finance directors have got a bit of a role to play here in terms of building that big picture that says if I do the calculation over a period of time, I can see that we can do this stuff that we need to do for less. As well as having more agility. If we move away from that traditional, I've got to buy tin and then I've got to run it because that is starting to become a very expensive model for delivering services if you can get the right consumption capability and you get that consumption capability at scale with the provider of cloud services. So I think the future is about changing the mindset of the way the finance elements of higher education. Tend to think about investment and particularly research is a challenge because research brings funding, but it also requires match funding in most instances from the institution and that stops you from using an OpEx model. You have to show I have bought an asset with this research funding and it has a lifetime. That model needs to change in the future I think. I'll take a last 30 seconds from Fraser and then we'll probably have to move to the next step panel discussion that we have raiser. Thank you. Yes. So I wanted to come. I'm very, very insightful and absolutely bang on the money. I think what I would add there is that often a move to the cloud can expose the total cut, the true total cost of ownership. So yes, you buy the equipment and then you sweat it and you definitely sweat it in most cases in my experience beyond where you might normally cloud doesn't really let you do that. You have to understand and you it really helps to expose that. Total cost of running that piece of infrastructure and utilizing it. It is a challenge though, it's a mindset challenge as much as anything else. And universities in my experience are very set up for capital and far less so for OpEx for all the reasons that have been talked about. But it is about managing that transition and sometimes the managing the transition can be a bit harder than where you end up getting to hopefully where with a much better understanding of what that OpEx is than that true cost is and after all understanding what that might be. Year by month by month, even week by week basis, it's got to be better than lurching from one major capital investment to another in 357 whenever it might be years. You can be much more planned and much more strategic around your use of your understanding the costs of doing these things. True, thank you all the panelists. Very, very interesting insights have been shared. But unfortunately we have to conclude this first panel discussion. And then we will move to the next one. Indeed very, very interesting insights received from all our panelists as part of cloud first approach journey for higher education universities. Now it's time to move to our next topic, Very, very interesting one as far as I'm concerned. What are the core ingredients when we talk about smart universities or future? Smart is very nice dagger nowadays, so I'm very keen to understand what sort of ingredients go into a smart. University of Future might want to bring a pad in Paddy. From your perspective, what are the core ingredients you see from a smart universities of future? No, I think it's really to provide enhanced Cape, enhanced digital capability. And to provide access to support student success analytics, to ensure properly appropriate engagement by students and to provide a repository of information to the leadership in universities, to support them in managing the universities. Over the last two years, of course, we've all been. Were launched into supporting blended learning models. And I think as discussed in the early part of the discussion, that's very much the university of now. Our university future is here now and it's very much to support a blended learning model. So as provided the technology then we have to ensure that we can support our universities in delivering those programs and supporting that blended model. And I think that's very much put technology to the forefront as a key requirement to universities and really look to evolve and. Obviously research is in there as well as the key component to ensure that we can provide research capability and connectivity as well across the universities and globally. So it's access to high end digital capability to support the key high end objectives of the universities. Yeah, thank you paddy. So it also is an interesting for lay on how student and tutor engagement and experience is getting transformed on backup cloud. So anytime, anywhere connectivity, how relevant is it in the current world of distributed student landscape, especially in the pandemic struck world. Fraser, you want to come in? Sure. So I think just to pick up on that point and then I might kind of elaborate a little bit around what's smart. It certainly means for Harriet what. So the ability for us to connect students with educators and of course students with students is absolutely fundamental in what we've seen over the last couple of years. And what we see is the vision for the future of teaching and learning certainly the way that we approach it within. Within Herriot Watt, and to be fair, we've been doing that for many, many years. You're alluded to in the introductions around the fact that we have 5 campuses across 3 continents. So we obviously have always needed to connect our students virtually. The opening up of technology and the utilization of technology has really helped to facilitate that. But I think we've got to remember that it's not just about the technology. We have to have our. Our educators being able to engage with and use the technology we have to be able to support our students in making making proper use of that technology. So it's much as much about digital skills and capabilities as it is about what kit someone has and how much bandwidth connectivity you might have. To pick up on the point around SMART, certainly what that means for us, there's two aspects. So a lot of talk around in the sector around SMART or intelligent buildings and then a lot of discussion around the use of analytics, all of which both of which are driven by data. And I think that is a really going to be a really big part of what the future looks like for universities, how we use our data, how we use the data that our buildings and our infrastructure are generating, but also how do we use the data that our staff and students are generating for the advantage of the students. And that's a really important aspect to keep coming back to. So it's not just doing doing analytics for analytics sake, it's about doing it to enhance the student experience and to make sure that we're. Properly supporting students and there's huge amounts that we can do in that area. Yeah. And did Peter, you want to reflect anything on the relevance of analytics and how student experiences are transformed on that? I think Fraser made a very interesting point. I see a lot of reflections from retail industry for it. And indeed, you know on Fraser's buying one, you know without the data, you know you can do nothing but you when it comes to analytics, we've seen a paradigm shift from what I would call traditional BI business intelligence reporting. But to the AIML data science and basically to be successful going forward, people like to know what happened, what's likely to happen, and what can I do to change it. And that's where AI. And then ML really comes into its own. Now it's true that there are varying degrees of maturity and AI and ML capabilities and, for example, chat bots. Use natural language process nor maybe rule based and then if you think about digital assistance, stabling and. More of an AI thing. But know I got a big role to play with universities. To give you an interesting anecdote, you know, over 5% of students drop out in their first year. Neither I'm interested, I don't know, a few 100 million in lost fees, fees that I understand that you can't recover, you can't fill the hole if someone leaves one. I think AIML can certainly give us some insight into why that's happening. You know, is it part of the journey before they get to uni? Is it when they arrive? How can we analyze student behaviours, attendance patterns or indeed the coaches? I mean our academics bringing data sets together is what really makes it AI possible. And I think your education has a massive pool of all sorts of data. You know, we see all sorts of reports and stats. I would like to see these brought together. To give us insight into the things that we people maybe haven't thought about, the influences that maybe haven't been spotted. In fact, that brings me to an interesting question. Actually, cloud is not just about the infrastructure as a service. It is also about leveraging the advanced capabilities that are present with respect to analytics, AI, ML, etcetera. So I just wanted to understand that if there were any reflections with respect to utilization of artificial intelligence or machine language in terms of transforming the learning experience of students? Malcolm, do you have a point of view on this? Yes, thanks for the When we looked at this in Manchester, we wanted to bring together different sources of data and information that we could use to really look at students from a 360 degree angle perspective. So the recruitment process, how do we make sure we recruit the right people through what's often called the summer melt? We would see 65,000 people apply to Manchester and it would reduce down to about 8000 by the time you got to August. So we're getting the right ones for the right course at the right time and the analytics helps us to understand what's going on that particular journey that when they arrive, we can start to see what they're doing and how they're interacting and that's what you start to see quite quickly. Is how a cohort of students who are in a particular programme of work are performing, and whether some of the act performing others, and whether some are lacking behind, And so the point that was made earlier. What we're trying to do is to identify modifiable risk behaviors that might mean they don't do as well as they can. So we want to keep them on track by identifying for them. Which things are keeping the others on track with their studies and on track with the sort of course activities and assignments that they're being given. And you can then use the same capability to track things like well-being because you're seeing the behaviors of students when they're doing things for on a common basis. But then they start to drift away and you want to be able to understand why they're drifting away and what interventions you can make. And finally, the other thing that is probably less popular is the ability to track the performance of academics, teachers, those that are doing really well, because you can see that they're the ones that the students already always turn up to lectures for, and those that maybe are not quite so interesting and the students tend to do something else during that lecture period. But you seriously, it's about looking at it from both angles because it is an intervention to make. For the academic to perform better. Then that's a great outcome because that actually means that the student feedback is being heard and actions being taken and that's what the capability in analytics in the cloud can give you, I think. Yeah, maybe a viewpoint or two from Fraser on how is workplace modernization and collaboration tools being envisaged in universities? How is cloud playing a role there? To. The biggest impact I think that I've certainly seen over the last few years is the certainly in the UK and the sector are around the use of the Microsoft 365 cloud based platform which is fundamentally I think transformed the way that we do business. Whether it's the use of teams to replace face to face meetings or indeed to conduct hybrid or collaborating on documents that. Word Online gives you or through the sharing of documents through SharePoint fundamentally that has that has given us so many additional collaborative tools that's helped us move certainly through the pandemic period if not indeed beforehand and certainly it's certainly going forward. So that's a that's a fantastic resource. That said that we've been able to utilize there are obviously I. Of obliged to say. Of course other platforms are available, but certainly that's the one that's been a biggest use within the UK higher Ed sectors from what I can see. True. I think the acceleration in the last two years was definitely unprecedented in terms of collaboration tools. And there are obvious reasons of pandemic and. Betty, what one of the interesting aspect that I wanted to your reflection on is about everything on security. I mean usually when it is all in the data center you feel under control, you have certain perceptions and certain Ways and Means that you are used to do it for a long time. Historically, putting on cloud is almost sort of giving all that away. So within the higher education universities, what sort of security concerns prevail and how do we overcome? Or how do we give them perspective that cloud is a lot more secure? No, I think there there's no doubt that we all operating very challenging cyber security landscape and you know the ever increasing threat is there to and where we all have to remain vigilant in dealing with us. Definitely needs a change in culture and a change in mindset when you move to cloud services. When you hand over the ownership of infrastructure, of the security of the infrastructure, security, the applications to your cloud provider certainly is a fundamental shift in thinking across universities and across organizations. There everybody has still has a role to play. It's just those role slightly change with a reliance on the cloud providers. To ensure that they're compliant with industry best practices and thankfully you know that's the business they're in. So they're very much are compliant and it addresses any concerns we may have arrived as mentioned earlier around Sweating Acids, aging infrastructure, you know we have support from our cloud providers in managing that infrastructure and that's very much the risk, the overall environment for every to everyone's advantage. That's true. With respect to the data analytics capabilities, the researchers are the biggest sort of consumers with respect to analytics capabilities. Did you do you all have experiences of where cloud has really accelerated? I know Malcolm has reflected on it initially. Peter, you have any with respect for club? As soon as you mentioned that, I thought of Malcolm's example which is a great example of how the cloud can scale up you know and provide the computer and the storage to do stuff really quickly. Also provides whole pile of native to native tools and 3rd party tools. To see if you write your own stuff. So all these things can help other things that we are seeing if you look in the sort of public sector generally. For example, in the health sector, people are pulling data together into one place to create data Marketplaces. We've seen it in health, we've seen it in the. A sort of travel industry and various other it is. There's a big overlap because researchers are already accessing this data. So we're seeing a data marketplaces, a great collaborative play between. Further education and research and the public sector generally, we expect to see that grow wider into industry. So we're expecting to see some growth into things like manufacturing and in banking, finance, insurance and telcos. And we see a lot of collaborative work because of data being made available through a an appropriately secure. Single point. True. To round this entire discussion about smart universities of future, we'll more or less sort of free up several possibilities to tutor students and the entire university ecosystem. How do you see the topic of cloud cost control? You have it in the hands of so many people. How? I mean, it's an interesting facet. Otherwise you have consumptions from all over the place. Forecasting and budgeting becomes an issue and any reflections are on it, Fraser. So it's very similar in my view to the how do we, how do we manage the if you data usage on mobile phones that we have distributed in the hands of many academics. I think it's about having if you almost parameters and putting putting in place the many cost controls that the platform providers will provide and making sure that they are they are understood. On that point, I think it's also really clear that we are transparent with what those costs are. Having a really detailed planned discussion with a researcher who intend to intends to use cloud computing about what they're likely to use, when they're likely to use it, how often and so on, I think is really important. And that's where the relationship between the researcher and the technologist within, certainly within my teams is really, really fundamental. They can work. Together, if you like to plan what that likely looks like, to plan out as closely as they possibly can what the cost might look like. And then of course make sure that we've got the funding, hopefully from extending external funding councils to be able to cover that. And then having in place the measure so that if it looks like it's getting out of control, can we can pause it, stop it and manage it from that point onwards. Yeah. In the interest of time, probably I'll have to bring it to a closure on this one, but I would like to thank all the panelists for the interesting perspectives that you have put through, see what my overall reflection of both the session has been. I got a broad perspective that there are several universities who have already adopting many capabilities that are available in cloud. I was very interested to hear how learning experiences have been being transformed by using analytics. I heard from paddy about how he's helping the organizations to adopt the digital transformation journey in a step by step way phrase error with respect to how the collaboration has improved across as well as the usage of cloud to avoid tech debt etc. Peter, from my all the perspectives on cloud economics as well as data perspectives, I think I can't thank all of you enough and I'm sure the our participants would have got a holistic view with respect to these topics. I just see some questions posted in the Q&A here. If we have time, I would like to pick a couple of them. Same we heard from my What advantages are there for the universities to go to cloud? The question that I have is what is the advantage for students for moving to cloud? Betty, you want to take it? I think if we've learned anything from the last two years, is that really it's access to. To lectures and students accessing universities remotely and I think that's really. That blended model that we need to be able to support and that's the model that they expected from our students, particularly considering the blended model that has evolved over the last two years and supporting that model into the future. So I think certainly the scalability of environments available through cloud, we certainly support universities in providing greater access to students and to deal with that demand. One more question that is coming our way is how connectivity at anytime, anywhere? Be enabled via cloud? Fraser, you want to pick that up? I. So I think the in addition to the scalability the. The 24/7 nature of cloud providers I think very much helps in that area. Not that we couldn't do it in our own university, rather actually it would be incredibly expensive. Much more expensive perhaps to try and replicate that. And I think that that's especially important in a university like mine where we've got we've got 18 hours a day coverage across teaching activity and student activity and that's not even counting those students who choose to work outside or study outside the normal working hours. So the high availability of cloud based resources really helps us in that regard. It means that we don't necessarily have to scale up our own internal operation with all that might. All the implications that might bring to be able to deliver pretty much as near to 24/7 365 as students are now expecting. Yeah, if I may. Go ahead. Sorry, fair enough. I for me, I was just thinking about just a network side of things. You're the cloud, we're already seeing some models emerge private 5G for example. We've predicted we'll see more of that on campuses it campus, Wi-Fi itself. Understand can be quite challenging. The cloud edge computing especially can help with that. Software defined ones and VoIP, telephony, all of these things can be supported by the cloud. As Fraser says, I'm more scalable and high available we. Yeah. And thank you, Peter. I would like to thank all of you for the participation. Once again the panelists, it was a pleasure discussing with you, but unfortunately that is all the time we have today. We would like to thank our audience for all the interesting questions and the participations. If we were not able to answer your question, be sure that we will follow up with you after the event. You could also reach us out at education.advisor@tcs.com. As part of this initiative of transformative role for cloud in higher education, TCS is happy to engage with you in an inspiration day where we can jointly ideate and chart out a road map, which is your cloud, your journey. Thank you for the time, and with that we bring today's session to a close.