EMC Syncplicity Helps Lesley University Teach the Teachers

Lesley University is the largest provider of teacher education in the US with campuses in Cambridge and Boston, MA, it’s been ‘teaching the teachers’ for more than 100 years, at every stage in their careers.

“We serve teachers who are looking for recertification, teachers who want to come up to date in their fields and have the tools they need to really reach out to their students,” said Scott Boulet, director of enterprise applications and servers, Lesley University.

The university also runs remote programs and seminars all over the country. Staff on the road needs the same data and network access as their colleagues on campus. The university tried a number of solutions, including VPN. But VPN depends on high-speed Internet access, which isn’t always available. And consumer file-sharing services like Dropbox or Google Docs lacked adequate security and control. Lesley needed an easy, secure way for users to sync and share files from the road. Something with enterprise controls and the ability to manage, track, report, and encrypt file-sharing activity.

That describes EMC Syncplicity Enterprise Edition from Syncplicity, Inc., an EMC company, in a nutshell and it turned out to be perfect for Lesley University’s needs.

“Our tech council ruled out solutions that required us to place additional hardware in our data center. Everyone on the tech council has a mobile device so they could see instantly how Syncplicity could help them do their jobs. Plus, we know EMC is a company we can trust with our data, and that the solution will be around and supported in the long term,” said Boulet.

Deployment was easy and, after seven months, user adoption reached 52%- significantly above the university’s norm for software adoption. With Syncplicity, staff could access documents from any location using their iPhones and iPads. Users were hooked by Syncplicity’s convenience. And IT could breathe easy with enterprise-grade security and access controls.

Because Syncplicity stores user information in the cloud,
Lesley University gained key operational benefits which include:

• Less need for desktop storage and standalone drives
• Fewer support calls for more storage or VPN accounts
• Improved network performance
• Streamlined, secure access to data via mobile devices

“With desktop footprints getting smaller and smaller, being able to safeguard our data in the cloud and then access it from anywhere is a huge advantage. By untethering our users from their desktops, we’re lowering our hardware costs and reducing the load on our servers and network. Couple that with seamless data access for our users, and Syncplicity is a real win-win,” said Boulet.