University Leverages Ntirety’s Professional Services for Data Modernization and Database Services to Improve Student Engagement
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Overview
Modern organizations are fueled by data, leveraging insights from that data to grow and optimize. This is especially pertinent in higher education. Harnessing data on attendance, dropout rates, and classroom participation helps institutions proactively engage with students to keep them on a path to graduation.
Challenge
For one university, leveraging data required migrating two on-premises data centers to Microsoft Azure, a big demand on the internal IT team’s bandwidth and expertise.
To realize the full potential of its data, the organization needed expert guidance in data architecture and database support. The university recognized that this level of expertise would bring value to every aspect of the data lifecycle.
To fill the database expertise gap, the university partnered with Ntirety for Database Administrator (DBA) services and Data Modernization.
Solution
Ntirety supported every aspect of the data lifecycle, helping the university gather the insights it needed to impactfully engage with students. The university leveraged Ntirety’s expertise for Data Factory, Databricks, machine learning, and other Azure services. This freed up the university’s internal IT teams and data scientists to focus on other core responsibilities. Ntirety also provided guidance and training for internal developers as new products and tools became available.
Ntirety’s professional services provided the Azure, database and business intelligence expertise required to continuously improve the performance of the database environment, reduce costs and optimize resources. Ntirety’s database support enabled the university to truly begin leveraging its data by providing the ongoing implementations and 24×7 management aspects of the data lifecycle.
Once the future state was deployed and managed to ensure availability and performance, Ntirety helped spearhead the direction of the university’s business intelligence and AI initiatives. By performing much of the technological roadmap design and the associated data engineering, Ntirety helped the university’s data scientists focus on building algorithms and gleaning insightful data from the information they had.
Results
Leveraging data to make more informed, accurate business decisions is the most beneficial point in the data lifecycle for almost every organization. The university’s data scientists were now equipped to start gathering more sophisticated insights.
By collecting and standardizing data from a variety of different systems, data scientists could evaluate a more complete picture of student success criteria including class attendance, participation levels, interaction rates with advisors, and more. Through the IT architecture designed and constructed by Ntirety’s data services experts in conjunction with the university’s internal tech team, the university was able to implement forecasting models to determine those students who were at-risk and proactively engage them earlier in their academic careers to help them stay in their programs and achieve their degrees at a higher success rate.
The university effectively implemented its own IT initiatives in part due to the foundational database services Ntirety provided. From the smooth migration from on-premises to Microsoft Azure cloud and Ntirety Professional Services, Ntirety helped enable continuous success for the university’s data scientists and ultimately its students as well.