Denver's Auraria Campus: How 3 Small Institutions Support Each Other During City-Wide Outages

When it comes to college campuses, outages have to be taken seriously, whether they are power outages or internet outages. Students need power and internet to study while employees need both to be able to make lessons and ensure that students are getting the help they need for upcoming exams and projects. 

 

Sometimes, it can be hard for smaller institutions to keep up with all their students. Luckily, this is not the case with the three institutions that call Denver’s Auraria campus home. 

 

This guide will cover how all three places use special IT services that allow their students and staff members to be connected all the time. 

All About the Auraria Higher Education Center 

 

You’ll find the Auraria Higher Education Center right in the heart of downtown Denver. The campus consists of three different institutions including the Community College of Denver, the University of Colorado Denver, and the Metropolitan State University of Denver. 

 

The Auraria Higher Education Center is unique because it has the main job of ensuring that the other three institutions are able to manage their different services, property, and facilities. 

 

Since there are about 38,000 studies and 5,000 staff members on the campus, this is not an easy task. 

 

They need to make sure that these thousands and thousands of people who are all on campus at the same time have access to the right services and infrastructure that allow them to work and study in harmony. 

Outages in Denver

 

Just like all big cities, Denver is prone to many different kinds of outages whether it be with the power company or with the internet providers. While the government and local companies try their best to ensure these outages don’t happen, sometimes they are unavoidable. 

 

While other institutions and parts of the city might suffer, the Auraria campus is committed to ensuring that the students and staff at these buildings are able to have everything they need to keep working and studying. 

 

One of the main ways they are able to overcome outages and ensure everyone has what they need to continue working is by providing IT-managed services. 

 

Auraria Higher Education Center and IT Managed Services 

These three institutions would never be able to work seamlessly the way they do without using IT-managed services. These services also allow the colleges to be more competitive compared to others because they are always up and running with little downtime. 

 

As students and staff want to be at places where they can be successful, they are more likely to choose institutions where they feel like they have the opportunity to learn and grow. This is possible when the network is never down and students can study whenever they need to. 

Benefits of the IT Managed Services at the Auraria Campus 

 

If you never worked in IT before or never used IT-managed services, you might not understand how beneficial they are to those who need them. 

 

Here are the main ways that the three different institutions can all be running without any hiccups through the services of IT management. 

Access to Experts 

 

Not everyone who works on the college campus is an IT expert. There will often be workers and students that run into issues with their email or their study portal and they are not sure how to handle it or move forward. 

 

When there is an IT management team around, these people can always provide the needed advice and ensure that everything gets back up and running. 

 

These experts can also fix things going wrong with the campus as a whole if there happens to be downtime in the network or numerous problems with the portals that students use to study and submit assignments. 

Better Data Protection 

 

College is meant to be a safe place where employees and students come to learn. When connecting to the network, they should be assured that all their personal information is secure whether it’s school-related or not. 

 

Here are some of the ways that the Auraria Campus ensures the data of everyone on site is protected:

 

• Little to no downtime. The IT management team is committed to getting everything running again even if there is an outage or downtime. 
• Enhanced Data protection. Students can study as well as log onto other websites where they might have to put in personal information without worrying about the system stealing their information. 
• Better cybersecurity. In this day and age, cyber security attacks have become more and more common. Managed IT teams can ensure your network and system do not have any vulnerabilities that allow hackers to come in. 

Better Response Time 

 

When there is a city-wide outage, the IT management team responds right away and ensures that the downtime is as minimal as possible. The institutions also conduct regular performance reviews to see where things can be managed better and where things might be going wrong. 

 

This also ensures that the network downtime is as quick as possible This is especially important when there are students taking online exams because the IT team always ensures they have the opportunity to submit their answers and turn in their work on time. 

 

The IT team is able to ensure quick response time because they always have the following:

 

• Network management 
• Monitoring of the networks 
• Data back up both on-site and off-site
• A plan for when the site goes down and exactly how to fix it as quickly as possible

The Bottom Line 

 

Here at Denver’s Auraria campus, we strive to make sure all the institutions can work together during outages so that no one has to be without the things they need to have a successful education. 

 

With IT-managed services, all of this is possible and easy because we have a reliable network with data backup both on and off campus. When studying or working from here, you always have the data protection and security you need.