San Diego Community College District Wins 2024 CENIC Award for Innovative Cloud and Networking Project
CENIC has awarded the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) the 2024 Innovations in Networking Award for Network-Enabled Cloud Applications: Education and Administration for its transition of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The award acknowledges the project's role in modernising SDCCD’s educational and administrative functions to improve efficiency, scalability, and security. This initiative is part of CENIC's effort to honour exceptional uses of high-bandwidth networking.
Louis Fox, CEO of CENIC, stated, “This project is expected to improve operational efficiency within the district and enable advanced data analytics, which could enhance data-informed teaching and learning processes. We're pleased to recognise a project that could serve as a reference for other community college districts in California and elsewhere.”
The project was jointly supported by the CCC Technology Center and CENIC and led by Peter Maharaj, SDCCD's Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology, and Cindy McCartney from the CCC Technology Center. It entailed migrating the district's PeopleSoft/Oracle ERP to OCI and upgrading the wireless network across campuses to ensure high reliability, enhanced security, and better connectivity.
Gregory Smith, Chancellor of the SDCCD, remarked, “The technology infrastructure is crucial for the privacy, safety, and educational support of our students, faculty, classified professionals, and administrators. These technological upgrades reflect our commitment to our community's trust.”
Serving as California's second-largest community college district, SDCCD educates nearly 100,000 students annually across its colleges and the San Diego College of Continuing Education campuses.
Astute Business Solutions facilitated the district's cloud migration to OCI in five months, creating a secure and modern enterprise architecture with disaster recovery, high availability, and automated system maintenance. The district has been operational on OCI since July 2023, running stable instances for production, non-production, and disaster recovery.
In September 2023, the district launched an upgraded Wi-Fi system, SDCCD-Campus-Connect, to provide stable and extensive Wi-Fi coverage across all campuses and district facilities.
Jacqueline Sabanos, SDCCE Vice President for Administrative Services, noted, “This recognition affirms our dedication to modernising our operations, making them more efficient and secure, which benefits our district's students and employees directly.”
