Make Your Campus Stand Out with the Campus Fabric Technology Advantage
Published: March 2, 2023
SUMMARY: Cutting-edge technologies create a better-quality student experience both on and off campus. And fabric networking is the perfect way to weave it all together.
Quality is hard to come by. Our quick-fix, throw-away culture is conditioned for instant gratification. Students are slipping into overpriced ubers, snarfing ramen and submitting ChatGPT school essays. And we’re all addicted to scrolling, life hacks and facial filters.
It’s no wonder when something is created with time and extra care, it stands out.
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” ~Steve Jobs
Choosing Good Quality
Take your favorite pair of jeans. Denim used to be 100% cotton. But today’s jeans are an intelligent mix of fibers specially chosen for durability, comfort, and strength. The more attention given to the fabric and how the strands are woven together, the better quality the material.
Fabric makers work to achieve durability, strength and fit. Extra steps are taken to choose each individual strand. And the weave is chosen to bind them together in a way that brings consistent, unified reliability.
Unraveling the Campus Network
There are many strands in a campus network. Each separate place provides individual experiences to students and staff. A student may spend the day going from place to place, using their device to conduct student life and maneuvering through separate environments.
Network administrators have the task of juggling all those single elements, supervising them and making sure they all are functioning well and reaching the right people at the right times. Much like the town mayor, they must oversee it all from a vantage point that is getting more tangled the more elements that are are added.
“We are weaving the future on the loom of today.” ~Grace Dawson
Weaving It All Together with Fabric
A good cloud computing platform weaves together different parts of the network, enabling them all to work together to form a single entity. Like a piece of cloth, this network is stronger and more durable. Consistent. And much easier to manage.
This is what fabric technology can achieve in the campus network. Higher education and quality must go hand in hand today. Every step a student takes should reinforce why they’re paying good money to get an education. And that means providing quality in the digital experience.
Let’s take a quick look at what adding fabric to the campus network can do:
Speed Things Up
And we mean everything. Applying fabric to the network brings:
- Anywhere, any service connectivity
- Plug-and-play deployment with faster time to service
- Streamlined, scalable multicast services
- Ability to deploy, configure, and provision multiple devices at once
- Extreme’s 11x faster time to service
- Extreme’s 7x better time to repair
Unify Network Services
A good quality fabric can be felt throughout each action and movement. In the campus network, it should bring that same quality consistently regardless of where a user is or what they’re using.
- Simplified, common services
- Superior user experience
- Wired, wireless, SD-WAN, third party
Ruining Your Favorite Movie Heist with Fabric Technology
Establish Inherent Security
There’s no room for gaps or weak spots in a network charged with safeguarding the sensitive data of many users. Fabric technology provides both barrier and sentry across campus.
- End-to-end unbreachable security
- Extreme’s hyper-segmentation to block lateral movement
- Unbreachable to hackathons
Provide Full Automation
More streamlined network management resolves a world of challenges. Fabric is the spider to your campus web, enabling you to feel, reach for and tend to each strand in the right way at the right time.
- More efficient management
- Highly scalable across data center, campus, branch
The Fabric Advantage
With fabric technology in their toolbox, network administrators become the master weavers of the campus network. A stronger, more consistent experience – for both users and administrators – makes managing all the individual elements easier and more natural.
The result is a quality that can be felt across the campus. And this is exactly the kind of differentiation that makes a college or university stand out.