Founded in 1746, Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university with over 5,200 undergraduate, 2,600 graduate students and 1,000 faculty members.

Princeton requires a world-class, agile and secure communications platform that will support both traditional and emerging IT services to meet the university’s educational and research missions. Our project was to deliver a buildable design to transform and modernize their network with the following goals:

• Facilitate world-class research and education using the network as transport as well as to directly perform research and develop technologies on and with the network
• Enhance wireless as the primary consumer network for IT services
• Support highly available critical business, operational and life safe systems
• Augment community-specific network security
• Support and provide collaboration services
• Ensure tactical and long-term network agility to support dynamic IT needs and evolving technology trends

After defining their high-level network vision, Vantage partnered with Princeton’s technical staff and provided expert guidance for the detailed design, costing and implementation strategies, including:

• Benchmark Princeton IT versus its peer group
• Create a coherent design ready for implementation
• Integrate automation and orchestration in support of “network as code” and DevOps
• Redesign the network border to accommodate role-based access controls, elephant flows and compliance enclaves/zones
• Develop an accelerated deployment strategy to successfully modernize the entire enterprise network, Internet/WAN border and WiFi over two years
• Identify process for accelerated procurement and RFPs for manufacturer selection of all major design elements
• Provide estimates of the life-cycle costs for selected options for capital costs of equipment and services, ongoing maintenance and operational costs and implementation costs

Challenge assumptions and conventional wisdom in support of innovation, risk-informed objectives and stretch goals

• Benchmark the existing network and future vision with peers
• Realistic and implementable design for a best-in-class network
• Unparalleled network capable of meeting compliance objectives when competing for grants and research funding
• Continuous improvement plan ensuring the network will always be ready to enable the institutional mission

• Infrastructure Design
• IT Costs + Financial
• Peer Review
• Strategic Planning
• Transition Planning
• Information Security

• IT Infrastructure
• IT Systems
• Network
• Automation/orchestration
• Wireless Network