Delphix, Unisys transform California State University’s Digital Strategy

The nation’s largest four-year public university can now provide its 23 campuses with data on-demand to implement their own digital strategies. This kind of rapid access has enabled software engineers at the campuses to quickly develop innovative applications to enable Graduation Initiative 2025, an ambitious project that aims to increase graduation rates while eliminating opportunity and achievement gaps. The project also includes applications that enable students to check their grades, financial aid, graduation status, etc.

The initiative is a part of the university’s larger hybrid architecture strategy aimed at improving graduation rates, student experience and satisfaction, and eliminating equity gaps in graduation rates.

Hybrid architecture Strategy

Unisys enables CSU to leverage the Delphix DevOps Data Platform to accelerate and simplify its Hybrid-Architecture enablement. The platform’s ability to easily spin up, refresh, and tear down private and public cloud-based data environments dramatically enhances the university’s application delivery pipeline.

“Using Delphix and Unisys to implement our hybrid architecture strategy allows us, for the first time, to create a unified and secure data lake, populated daily with data from all 23 campuses. This makes the data easily accessible and quickly consumable at a large scale. Our data analysts, data scientists, and developers can now drive faster innovation and proactively establish student support programs to improve graduation rates,” said Michael Berman, CIO at CSU.

The university’s hybrid architecture strategy includes data migration from an on-premise Common Management System (CMS) to Amazon Web Services (AWS), across all campuses. The CMS serves nearly 500,000 students and 56,000 faculty and staff, and is critical to everything from student enrollment, student management, scheduling, and registration to human resources, financials, and employee compensation.

“We are pleased CSU and Unisys selected AWS as a strategic cloud provider to power its digital transformation,” said Kim Majerus, Vice President, US Education, State and Local Government at AWS. “Moving to AWS can help CSU become more agile and empower them to use data more strategically to gain valuable insights that will improve the student experience. In addition, it can help the university system scale faster, reduce technical debt, realize cost savings, and manage operations more efficiently.”

Impact on Cost and Efficiency

Delphix and Unisys work together with CSU to help the university reduce costs and improve operational efficiency.

Using Delphix and Unisys, CSU has saved over $4.5M per year and avoided future costs of over $7M per year in data storage expenditures, thus freeing up resources to fund innovation. The initiative has also significantly improved CSU’s productivity measures.

• The Delphix DevOps Data Platform delivers virtual masked copies of the CMS production data on-demand, using a fraction of the storage space compared to physical data storage. This has helped Unisys reduce CSU's physical storage consumption while allowing its campuses to use self-service to clone and manipulate their data.

• Delphix’s data automation helps Unisys deliver data faster and more frequently to CSU’s campuses. The application teams can now instantly refresh copies with updated production data, rewind data to any previous point in time, and branch out data copies so data versions align with release versions, all of which dramatically improve productivity.

“We are proud to partner with Delphix to enable CSU’s hybrid architecture strategy to provide improved data delivery, data access, and data integration to better support the digital strategies at CSU,” said Rudy Gonzalez, Unisys CSU Program Director. “We remain committed to helping CSU have much greater agility to execute digital cloud strategies to better serve the campuses and improve the student experience.”

Jedidiah Yueh, Delphix CEO, added, “Transformational automation is a game-changer, enabling 100x increases in innovation velocity. Modern data automation with integrated security and compliance enables CSU to improve student outcomes and experiences, spend less on infrastructure, and invest more in strategic initiatives.”