By Jay Atkinson
AIS Network CEO
We exhibited at the 2014 ACCS Annual Conference (Association of Collegiate Computing Services of Virginia) in Charlottesville last week and it was one of our favorite shows to date. The ACCS Conference volunteers did a tremendous job. They really take pride in the conference, make the vendors feel appreciated, and fed everybody well! Everyone we met was really great – friendly, enthusiastic and well informed. We learned a lot from everyone – from the keynotes to the attendees. It really will help us serve the higher education market even better.
What were people buzzing about (besides the Cisco Casino Night)? Frankly, we kept hearing about the keynotes. We were impressed with who was booked for the event.
-Author of The Crowdfunding Bible, Scott Steinberg, who is a well known business strategist
-Melina Davis-Martin, co-founder of PlanG Holdings who developed a cause marketing platform and has an impressive background in health & human services.
For AISN, we found the biggest topic we were hearing at our booth was in regard to disaster recovery and FERPA compliance. As a hosting company that has implemented the NIST security control framework, this didn’t come as a surprise to us.
It makes good sense why disaster recovery is very important to higher education. Colleges and universities are often large institutions with many different stakeholders (students, teachers, staff, the community), can be on multiple campuses and are large consumers of technology. Data can be student data, financial data, research data, alumni data, grant data – the list goes on and on. So, it’s no big surprise to us to see the interest in protecting this data in the event of a disaster.Our takeaways from the show – we definitely want to do this show again next year and will be looking for other ways to engage with the higher education market. And we are thinking it might be time to do a webinar on disaster recovery specifically aimed at the needs of higher education, so stay tuned for this. Have thoughts on this? We would love to hear from you in the comments below.