A Kentucky college system’s seemingly seamless network overhaul

Breakups suck…except when they are with your outdated network infrastructure.

Breakups can also be pretty eye-opening. At least, that was the case for Kenneth Burdine, associate VP and deputy CIO at the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS). Last year, KCTCS underwent a massive network transformation to address some of the connectivity pain points student and faculty members encountered when on one of the college system’s 16 colleges.

Burdine told IT Brew the college system made the transition to Juniper Networks from an industry-standard networking provider, a move that has invigorated KCTCS users and staffers.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I have a whole new outlook,” Burdine said. “I’m excited.”

Old ways. Burdine said uptime is crucial for KCTCS students, who need to complete their coursework at the school’s more than 80 campuses.

Support tickets prior to the college system’s recent overhaul were mainly related to dropped network coverage and slower connection speeds. Burdine said wireless is a “fun beast to tame” because when an issue arises, users will often do a “drive by” ticket request, meaning the request is solved before IT staffers get to it.

“By the time we answer the ticket and we go and investigate, the issue has resolved itself, thus exhausting any kind of troubleshooting methods that we have,” he said.

Addressing faculty members’ problems with KCTCS’s network had a “grapevine effect,” Burdine added, because of how tedious it was to find time to discuss the reported issues.

“By that time…they’re so busy and they have other things to worry about that they forget, or they don’t have a complete understanding of what happened,” Burdine said.

Burdine said KCTCS’s old network infrastructure was about five years old. Shashi Kiran, CMO at network-as-a-service provider Nile, said the fast rate of change on the vendor side of the network industry has shortened the lifespan of network investments for organizations.

“Networks used to be looked at as investments for a decade or more,” Kiran said. “Then, it got down to five to seven years. Now, we are seeing faster refreshes happen, particularly with the old type of networks, which are predominantly designed for static environments.”

Out with the old, in with the new. A network overhaul for an entity like KCTCS is not an easy one given its large footprint of campuses and buildings.

“We had 3,000 units, indoor and outdoor,” Burdine said. “That’s a lot of units over 90-plus locations all across the state of Kentucky.”

However, Burdine said the deployment of the new network infrastructure was a “seamless” and non-disruptive process because the brunt of the installation process involved taking one access point (AP) down and putting the new one up.

“It took longer to climb that ladder to…take the AP down and put it up than for it to [actually] register and start taking on clients,” Burdine said.

“Because of this, we were able to implement a complete overhaul of our wireless to Juniper in less than 90 days, which, wow. I don’t know? I think it’s a world record,” he added.

Once access points were up and running, Burdine said Juniper’s Mist platform, which leverages AI to improve user experience, takes the guesswork out of troubleshooting problems.

“You could go into the issue itself and then Mist would go into whitepapers and describe what the issue is, and 99.9% [of the time] it would say, ‘This is the first action you should take, second action you should take, third action you should take to resolve that issue,’” Burdine said.

New network infrastructure, who dis? The network upgrade has paid off for KCTCS on many fronts. Burdine said the revamp has “rejuvenated” his IT staffers because they are learning something new.

“They’re happy to have something that’s more proactive than reactive,” he said.

Kristin Russell, CEO of IT solutions provider CBTS, said KCTCS hasn’t logged any single access point-related tickets since January. CBTS has partnered with KCTCS since 2002 and assisted the college system in its transition.

“With fewer manual fixes, they can focus on higher value work for students,” Russell said.

Students have not been vocal about changes to connectivity on campus, which Russell takes as a good sign, as users typically only reach out when they encounter a negative experience.

“We take great pride in [making] sure that we’re 100% up,” Burdine said. “And I know nobody can do 100%, I’ll take 99.99999%. How about that?”

Update: Kenneth Burdine is deputy CIO. A previous version of this article stated that he was deputy CISO.