SUMMARY
The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) 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:
- Ensure clinical environments are reliable and secure
- 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
- Support highly available critical academic, administrative, facilities and research systems
- Support and provide collaboration services
- Replace the phone system with a modern unified communications system
- Ensure tactical and long-term network agility to support dynamic IT needs and evolving technology trends
- Reduce deferred maintenance and technical debt moving to a supportable continuous improvement model with sustainable funding
After defining their high-level network vision, Vantage partnered with UIC’s technical staff and provided expert guidance for the detailed design, costing and implementation strategies, including:
- Benchmark UIC IT versus its peer group
- Create a coherent design ready for implementation
- Integrate automation and orchestration
- Secure by design including role-based access controls, and compliance enclaves/ zones
- Support research including elephant flows
- Develop an accelerated deployment strategy to successfully modernize the entire enterprise network, Internet/WAN border and WiFi over an accelerated timeline
- Innovative ideas to improve operations and reduce costs
- 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
BENEFITS
- Realistic and implementable design for a best-in-class network
- Benchmark the existing network and future vision with peers
- Modernized 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
SERVICES
- Infrastructure Design
- IT Costs + Financial
- Peer Review
- Strategic Planning
- Transition Planning
- Information Security
TECHNOLOGIES
- IT Infrastructure
- IT Systems
- Network
- Automation/orchestration
- Wireless Network
- Unified Communications
- Client: University of Illinois Chicago
- Location: Chicago, IL
- Market: Education
- Project: Network Strategic Plan