02 April 2025

Tom Whittle, Solutions architect – Networking, Telent

Robust and secure networking capabilities are pivotal to digital innovation and transformation within higher education and academic institutions. The education sector ranked fifth globally for cybercrime incidents, showcasing the need for a secure and reliable networking framework. When analysing devices within a university network, over 65% of Gen Z frequently use more than one device at a time, so they need a networking infrastructure that can cope with this demand.

Across the UK, both higher education and academic institutions are consistently looking for new ways to attract new academics, new students, and research teams to their campuses. So innovative and secure networks and technology stacks are not only key for talent attraction and retention but also support the university’s expansion plans helping move them up the global university rankings.

The dynamic and fluid university environment has led many IT teams to plan for an agile networking environment. A university’s networking capabilities must be implemented quickly and must have the ability to scale up or down depending on the university’s needs.

Key elements, such as robust security, wireless connectivity, directory structures, and automated managed devices, all play a significant role in creating an enhanced networking system for academic institutions. However, these elements must all work in tandem to deliver students, lecturers, and researchers with the networking connectivity they need to excel.

For students, administration staff, lecturers and researchers, the university network must remain seamless, easy to use, and easily integrated with the pre-existing IT infrastructure. Without a private, secure connection, this can hinder not only students’ academic work but also cause security concerns for sensitive research documents and data.

So the pressure is on for IT specialists to build and maintain secure networking capabilities, ensuring seamless connectivity and empowering innovation across higher education campuses.

Building resilient, high-performance networks

As universities increasingly rely on digital platforms for research, learning, and administration, developing a secure and high-performance networking infrastructure has become essential to support their growing demands and safeguard critical data.

Many higher education providers are recognising that having a robust, high-performance network is pivotal to a university’s digital transformation journey, providing the digital platform to begin introducing new innovations.

To achieve this IT managers should begin by establishing the size, scope and specification needed for the upgraded networking infrastructure. Once this is confirmed, IT teams can then build out an agile networking framework with capabilities to add additional services and upgrades in future.

By creating a networking infrastructure that fits perfectly within the university ecosystem, IT managers can ensure that they can continue innovating and creating an up-to-date, advanced networking system to attract new talent to their university.

The role of AI and automation in revolutionising campus connectivity

The recent boom in AI and automation can enable transforming high-education networks, driving smarter resource management, bolstering security, and enabling seamless connectivity to meet the evolving demands of modern campuses.

But how is AI making a difference?

As higher education institutions look to upgrade and transform their networking environments, this includes changing LAN infrastructures, modifying LAN systems, and enhancing wireless networking capabilities to cope with an increased influx of IoT devices within the network.

Many of these ‘headless devices’, such as BMS systems, printers, and smart speakers, rely on Wi-Fi capabilities to, not only identify efficiency and performance issues but also to manage security risks. This is where AI and automation can influence a university’s networking capability. By leveraging AI-driven analytics and automated processes, institutions can optimise network performance, predict, and prevent potential issues, and adapt to the increasing complexity of digital learning environments.
For instance, Oxford University recently introduced a new Juniper Mist Wi-Fi network with AI and automation capabilities to enhance wireless solutions and improve user experience. This new network benefits from the analysis of the data from all Mist solutions to deliver personalised monitoring, diagnostic reports, and configuration recommendations, ensuring optimised network performance and bandwidth strength at all access points across the campus.

Alongside recognising performance and efficiency issues, the use of automation and AI operations focused toolsets can also help support and strengthen the security of the networking infrastructure. This enhanced intelligence can highlight who can access the network and from where and also recognise security threats to the system. An increased visibility allows IT teams to create additional security context such as the location of user devices within the network, which aims to help keep both staff and student data private, but also sensitive research documents remain confidential.

Implementing AI and automated systems within a university network allows for enhanced visibility of the full network, allowing IT teams to ensure high performance and efficiency and pinpoint security risks to the whole network.

Empowering campus communities

High-performance networks are transforming university life, enhancing the student experience, streamlining administrative tasks for staff, and providing lecturers with the tools they need to deliver innovative, technology-driven education.

For university alumni, reliable and fast network connectivity is essential. Enabling seamless access to online resources, collaborative tools and learning experiences is paramount in fostering academic success and engagement.

In today’s digital world, users are extremely demanding, students and staff do not want to have different logins for different locations on campus, they now expect a centralised networking framework that is seamless and easily accessible from anywhere on campus. Empowering students with self-service, private wireless LAN connectivity allows individuals private connectivity instantly, offering more automation and ownership over their own education and learning.

From a student’s and lecturer’s point of view, having a centralised network means easy access to library, course, and research materials, which creates a better and more attractive university experience. But for university admin teams their expectations are slightly different, so IT teams must be equipped to cater for all individuals within the university network.

Establishing a seamless, high-performance network, equipped with AI and automated capabilities, eases the workload on administration staff. IT teams no longer need to focus on time-consuming data collection, unnecessary troubleshooting, and other mundane tasks. IT teams can equip the network to detect issues, collect data and also recommend solutions, either pre-emptively or immediately once an issue arises.

This added foresight allows the IT staff to focus more on university innovation and overall alignment with business strategy, offering them the opportunity to discuss additional technology deployment and scalability within the university campus. These added capabilities can provide a shift in the once mundane admin job roles, offering increased job satisfaction by allowing staff to contribute to more high-value work for the university.

By catering to the diverse needs of students, staff, and lecturers, a well-designed higher education network becomes the backbone of a thriving academic community, enabling innovation, collaboration, and success for all.

The value of future-ready IT networks in higher education

As with any new technology, high-performance networks come at a cost. But universities must recognise the value of having innovative networking infrastructure to help drive innovation, unlock new opportunities, and also support staff retention.

Typically, higher education institutions have a higher turnover of IT staff than other sectrors, with one of the main concerns in recent years being low salaries. Therefore, universities must do everything in their power to create an attractive workplace and research centre to attract the latest talent to their alumni community.

By embracing a fully-equipped, top-of-the-range networking framework, institutions can create value through enhanced connectivity, allowing students and staff to remain connected at all times throughout their academic journey. It can create next-level teaching environments through personalised learning experiences, offering student autonomy with their learning and supporting a new ‘work/learn-from-anywhere’ hybrid approach. It can also provide lecturers and researchers with robust support for innovative research, offering seamless connectivity with the research community and ensuring the security and confidentiality of private digital research documents.