Enabling New Levels of Academic Collaboration at One of Ireland’s Leading Universities

The university’s governing body is tasked with developing the long-term strategic vision for UCC supported by the right plans, policies, processes and controls.

Made up of around 40 people from diverse stakeholder groups – including administrative and academic staff, nominees from the Minister for Education and Skills and locally elected city and county councillors – the body must have access to, and be able to share, information regarding all aspects of the university’s operations.

UCC had a major challenge in being able to securely share this information, much of it commercially sensitive or personal in nature, among its governors in a timely manner.

The process of printing and posting the physical documents was slow and time-consuming and posed some security concerns regarding the disposal of data. Supported by CWSI, the university embarked on a project to increase collaboration and improve efficiency, using mobile technology.

UCC already had in place a Network Attached Storage (NAS) service which enabled existing employees to access shared files. The processes around requesting access, modifying permissions, and adding new folders to this service were mature and had been approved by external security auditors.

It made sense for UCC to find a solution that could leverage this existing service. CWSI worked closely with UCC’s IT team to evaluate options, ultimately recommending Acronis’s Access solution.

Access is a comprehensive content access, sync and file-sharing solution, designed to give end users an intuitive, familiar experience and provide IT teams with complete control, security and visibility.

CWSI identified that tablet devices were ideal for this group of users and began by rolling out a pilot scheme to a small group.   Clear success criteria were outlined at the beginning of the pilot, including user engagement and security sign-off from the university’s Office of Corporate and Legal Affairs, which administers the governing body.

The pilot proved a huge success.  The solution immediately met UCC’s needs from both a user and administrator perspective.  Users benefitted from additional features like annotation and personal folders that made the user experience even easier.

IT administrators benefitted from the ease of mapping existing user permissions and security groups onto the new Acronis service and improved visibility and management of users and data.

iPads were selected as the preferred device for roll-out to the whole group.  CWSI managed the end-to-end deployment of the solution and continue to provide proactive management and support to ensure that the solution continues to meet UCC’s evolving needs.