Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 52 | Page 59

CASE STUDY T ertiary education is developing rapidly in the UAE, with a fast- growing young population and a government committed to developing its ambitious Vision 2021 plan. This has created ever greater demand for world-class university education. The University of Sharjah, which opened in 1997, has grown significantly during its 20- year history in terms of research, diversity of courses offered and the number of students enrolled, which now stands at some 14,000. Amid this growth in student numbers, combined with the increasing demands of a young, tech savvy generation, the IT department was under increasing pressure to develop and deploy IT systems to take the university ICT systems to the next level. WE NEEDED TO PROVIDE HIGH-QUALITY SERVICES THAT PEOPLE COULD RELY ON; AND THOSE SERVICES NEEDED TO BE INNOVATIVE. The University of Sharjah had been collaborating with VMware on compute virtualisation for a number of years, speeding up delivery of critical applications and optimising the resource consumption, establishing savings on hardware, white space, energy consumption and cost. In 2018, the university took the decision to invest in the latest virtualisation solutions, and VMware was the obvious choice. The University of Sharjah opted to work with VMware to modernise its data centres, integrate public clouds, transform networking and security and empower digital workspaces. www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 59