Doane University develops future leaders by providing an intimate, hyper-connected academic experience

From transforming a barren midwestern hillside into a lush 300-acre accredited arboretum to designing a next-generation campus experience, Doane University has spent over 150 years leveraging the advantages of being small and nimble to enable big things.

“Throughout our history, we’ve been a center of educational innovation and excellence,” says Derek Bierman, CIO for Doane. “We focus on empowering students with the tools they need to pursue careers and lives grounded in a commitment to leadership and service.”

Offering small class sizes and passionate faculty in a residential setting, Doane attracts students from across North America and around the world. Its main campus encompasses 21 buildings, including six residence halls that house more than 70% of undergraduate and graduate attendees. Doane also maintains two satellite locations for non-traditional students.

A new wave of digital-first innovation

Like every higher education institution, Doane’s students expect the latest in seamless technology experiences and leading-edge learning opportunities, whether it’s academic XR or hybrid classrooms and collaborations.

But Doane’s leadership is pursuing a technology vision that goes even further in seeking to establish the next wave of digital-first, app-enabled education, entertainment, and administration. “Our president envisions fully digital journeys for students, faculty, staff, and alumni where every aspect of daily life is enabled by a mobile device,” Bierman says.

Although the plan includes more traditional experiences, like tablets and laptops in the classroom, it also envisions sports and hospitality-inspired abilities, like waving a smartphone to lock or unlock a door, pay for food services, or manage the university’s HVAC system.

“We also want a student’s phone to identify them wherever they are on campus, greet them personally, and anticipate what they may require next,” Bierman adds. “This will be based on multiple characteristics and data feeds, ranging from their class schedules to campus involvement. Similarly, we want our alumni to be welcomed warmly and guided to activities using event registration and other information.”

Realizing a hyper-connected vision

Naturally, the ability to realize Doane’s hyper-connected vision relies on having high-performance, robust, secure, and flexible wired and wireless networks. However, when network outages became increasingly frequent, Doane realized it needed an alternative to its legacy Cisco wired and Wi-Fi systems to keep its plans on track.

“The situation became acute when the pandemic hit and students were regularly dropped from their Zoom sessions while attending courses from their dorm rooms,” says Ryan Dorshorst, Director of Technology Operations. “We tried some stop-gap measures, but at a certain point we just couldn’t fix our existing system anymore.”

Location-aware and IoT-powered

Working with local partner DataVizion, Doane compared the costs and benefits of refreshing its wired and Wi-Fi networks with its incumbent vendor or partnering with HPE Aruba Networking. “The cost of the Cisco option, including ongoing licensing expenses, was prohibitive,” Dorshorst says. “With Aruba, we’ll save nearly 30 percent over the expected eight-year life of the solution.”

“Additionally,” he adds, “the Aruba solution provided us with future-ready features, such as built-in AIOps tools, BLE, Zigbee, and location awareness in Wi-Fi access points (APs) for supporting our planned adoption of various types of IoT solutions and location-enabled services.”

It was a similar story on the wired side. “In addition to the automation features within the CX Switching line, we were particularly impressed with Smart Rate,” says Dorshorst. “That technology would permit us to deliver more bandwidth to our facilities immediately and, as our needs evolved, increase capacity via simple upgrades, rather than undergoing an expensive and complex refresh.”

Always-on, robust, flexible backbone

Doane’s infrastructure initiative also included a data security review and refresh as its legacy firewall was unable to deliver the necessary performance for achieving the new hyper-connected vision. Doane first considered deploying a traditional firewall that was double the size of its existing equipment. Although this would somewhat improve traffic flow, Doane determined that bottlenecks would soon return.

Seeking a better alternative, Doane decided to investigate and, ultimately, deploy the HPE Aruba Networking Data Center Networking solution, specifically the CX 10000 Switch Series distributed services switch. With a stateful firewall engineered into the solution, Doane could create an always-on, robust, flexible backbone delivering secure connectivity for servers, storage, and edge networking that reduces IT overhead.

“Adopting the CX 10000 provided us with faster connectivity and improved data security for less than the expected capital cost of the larger traditional switch, plus we avoided ongoing management and updating expenses,” Dorshorst says.

“In addition to significantly better performance, our new data center networking switch provides complete East-West firewalling, which is more comprehensive than with a traditional switch,” he added. “We also gained the capability to microsegment traffic for more granular data security based on zero trust principles.”

Rapid implementation keeps personal data safe

From the identification of the network refresh imperative to completing a wired and wireless modernization of residence halls required less than eight weeks.

Subsequently, the balance of Doane’s main campus and the two satellites were deployed over a summer, which included all indoor and outdoor educational and sporting facilities, an outdoor amphitheater, and various outdoor student gathering places.

At the same time, Doane also deployed a new network access control solution, ClearPass, for built-in zero trust and secure access service edge (SASE) cybersecurity.

“In the past, implementing a new network and a new network access control solution were two completely separate projects that could each be challenging,” Dorshorst says. “With Aruba, it was so fast and smooth that we completed both initiatives, across three campuses, in less than nine weeks. It was phenomenal.”

10X throughput eliminates academic barriers

With its modernized, secure, high-performance infrastructure, Doane saw immediate rewards for making seamless, ubiquitous digital experiences a reality.

“By supplying 10 times the throughput to every building using our new wired switches and handling escalating device loads by adopting AI-powered Wi-Fi 6E, wireless incident tickets are down by 60%,” says Dorshorst. “The network is so stable we’ve virtually eliminated network downtime as a barrier to student success.”

AI enables focus on institutional innovation

In addition to supplying the connectivity foundation for academic innovations, Doane’s new infrastructure also ensures the university’s technology staff can re-focus from manual network administration to designing and implementing the many planned technology systems required for achieving institutional goals and objectives.

That’s because Doane chose advanced AI-powered management, such as cloud-based HPE Aruba Networking Central and its comprehensive artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) features. “Using Central, we can rapidly discover and resolve the root cause of issues,” Dorshorst says.

“For instance, one building appeared to exhibit an intermittent connectivity issue,” he continues. “Central quickly identified it as a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) problem and enabled us to fix the underlying issue the same day.”

In the past, an intermittent issue could’ve lingered for months, or longer, as Doane’s Technology Services searched for the source, he says.

Another AI-powered HPE Aruba Networking solution Doan adopted is User Experience Insight (UXI), which provides real-time network health and performance monitoring from the perspective of users and devices. This permits uncovering network degradations proactively, before they impact experiences.

More secure with less effort

Doane has also gained significant cybersecurity automation and efficiency capabilities by rolling out Dynamic Segmentation. It works in combination with their new infrastructure and ClearPass to assign every connected device to the proper wired switch port or wireless SSID on-the-fly, while ensuring each device is granted network and application access based on the appropriate, policy-based, level of security.

With secure connections dynamically assigned in real time, manual tasks are eliminated. “In our situation, with a myriad of technology adoptions on the horizon, the benefits of automating device connectivity can’t be overstated,” Dorshorst says. “It will enable us to handle the anticipated explosion of institutional and student devices without adding to Technology Services overhead.”

Greener and more resilient at better insurance rates

Yet another benefit of the university’s new network is improved business continuity and sustainability.

“By deploying Aruba’s remote access point (RAP) solution, we are providing secure plug-and-play connectivity to staff and faculty working remotely,” says Dorshorst. “For users, the experience is the same as if they were on campus, while RAPs automatically apply the appropriate security protocols in the background.”

Doane will also utilize the productivity enhancements and reduced networking costs as part of its sustainability efforts. “This will include implementing Aruba’s built-in features for automatically powering down networking equipment as appropriated when a space is vacant or underutilized, such as the stadium between games or classrooms overnight,” Dorshorst says.

Taken together, the advances enabled by Doane’s network will contribute toward negotiating improved insurance rates across multiple categories, including property, liability, workers comp, and cybersecurity.

Automating facilities managing and protecting irreplaceable artifacts

On the horizon is an array of institutional initiatives that Doane’s new network will support.

Early operational projects include fully leveraging a Siemens facility automation system and appropriately safeguarding Doane’s seven-room library archive. The former is accomplished by empowering facilities staff to quickly add HVAC and other IoT sensors to the network and set mobility-enabled alert parameters as needed, without requiring Technology Services intervention.

For protecting invaluable archival materials, the institution is deploying an EnOcean smart building solution for automating the formerly-manual process of tracking temperature and humidity data in the library archive. “The manual process gathering and recording data not only required about 80% of one archivist’s time, but it also lacked the ability to proactively alert us to an environmental change before irreplaceable objects were affected,” says Bierman.

With the automated system, Doane can keep sensitive items properly controlled and boost staff productivity. “Our archivists will be able to concentrate on higher value tasks, such as materials preservation and making collections more accessible,” Bierman says.

Advanced analytics for boosting student success

Improving student success is another objective, with Doane evaluating the options for integrating the location-awareness built into its Wi-Fi, along with other network-generated data, and its Salesforce CRM solution to support advanced analytics capabilities. This can enable Doane to establish various processes and protocols for improving student engagement, while still maintaining personal privacy.

“For example, if a faculty member is walking past a small group of students who gathered outdoors but are all registered as being in a classroom, the professor could receive a phone notification to start a conversation with the students to help re-engage them,” says Bierman. “Further, we can create general conversation starters, or other engagement tips, and push them out as part of the notification.”

New research partnerships expand opportunities

Doane is also planning to use its HPE Aruba Networking infrastructure to support the design and implementation of on-campus business centers. This will provide unique opportunities for students to conduct innovative industry research while gaining academic credentials.

“One type of business center under discussion would focus on robotics,” says Bierman. “Our engineering department envisions partnering with a robotics company on researching ways to advance the robotics industry. As robotics is a connectivity-intensive discipline, our new network is critical to realizing the department’s goal,” he adds.

Taking excellence into the future

Most recently, Doane completed a new residence hall and deployed its new networking infrastructure solutions. “We’re seeing gigabit-speed up and downloads, which easily handles all of the new Wi-Fi 6E computing, mobile, and IoT devices students are bringing on campus,” Dorshorst said. “This ensures our community has the best user experiences a university can provide.”

Moving ahead, Doane will evaluate other ways to enhance connectivity and experiences, such as Air Pass for enabling smooth hand-offs from public cellular to the wireless network for seamless Wi-Fi calling and other services. The institution will also investigate using HPE Aruba Networking Beacons for added location-aware support.

Overall, Doane’s new network has set the stage for everything to come.

“We used to measure success if we could keep our network online for a week,” says Bierman. “Now, our network is virtually never down.

“The AI, automation, and innovative features in our ESP network have made it future-ready, which is enabling us to say ‘yes’ to new initiatives that take our tradition of excellence into the future,” he adds. “It’s been a game-changer.”