California State University enhances data strategy for privacy and efficiency

California State University’s Results, At-a-Glance

California State University’s Story

Traditional academic institutions are globally competing against for profit schools, online universities, and specialized programs, while new learning platforms, such as Udemy and Smartly, are offering faster and cheaper alternatives to college; not to mention, digitally sophisticated students want the best return on their investment—all disrupting and reshaping higher education.

But California State University (CSU) is using software to deliver quality experiences to students and lead as a digital university of tomorrow. The California State University system is made up of 23 campuses across the state of California, serving nearly half a million students and employing over 50,000 faculty and staff.

The Challenge: Slow, Manual Data Delivery Across 23 Campuses as CMS Moved to the Hybrid Cloud

For the past several years, CSU has made a massive shift towards digital by investing heavily in its IT systems and activating programs to provide better student experiences and support initiatives, such as Graduation Initiative 2025.

CSU embarked on digital transformation with its Common Management System (CMS)—an Oracle/PeopleSoft software application environment critical to delivering everything from student enrollment, management, scheduling and registration to human resources, financials, and employee compensation—for all of its campuses geographically spread out in one of the largest states in the U.S. Simply put, the CMS is the heart of the entire university system infrastructure.

To make this massive IT system accessible and actionable across its highly distributed campus system, CSU embraced a hybrid cloud strategy to extend its existing infrastructure using AWS all while safeguarding its mission-critical information that exists both on-premises and in the cloud.

The university’s technology leaders understood that the cloud would help them achieve greater agility to support the campuses and faster delivery times for application development, and that new opportunities would emerge if they had better and faster access to information. CSU wanted to leverage access to CMS data and maximize delivery of that data to better serve the campuses and support campus programs that would ultimately drive better graduation rates, all while saving the university time and money along the way.

There were three major challenges when it came to migrating CMS to the hybrid cloud to power digital transformation:

• Pressure to reduce costs
• Demand from campuses for greater and faster access to data
• Rigorous security requirements

The Solution: Self-Service, Masked Virtual Data Copies Delivered On Demand with Delphix and Unisys

Delphix was brought in as the driving force behind the hybrid cloud migration coupled with the necessary data masking technology to safeguard critical data.

Working together with leading IT company Unisys to implement a DevOps strategy, CSU leveraged Delphix’s Data Platform with integrated data virtualization and masking technologies as well as self-service tools.

The Results: $7.5M in Annual Storage Savings and 2,000+ Monthly Data Requests Delivered in Minutes

This allowed CSU to achieve the following:

1. Game-changing operational outcomes

Delphix provides virtual copies of masked CMS production data on-demand, in minutes using just a fraction of the resources that the university was using before. This gets the necessary data to developers in order to deliver their applications quickly while protecting sensitive data. As a result, the university automates data delivery more quickly and frequently to the application teams across campuses.

Prior to Delphix, the CMS IT teams handled around 200 data cloning requests per month over a number of days to service individual campuses. Today, a smaller team executes more than 2,000 requests per month in minutes—all in an automated fashion.

With self-service access to data, CSU has the ability to move almost 15TB of data on a daily basis to serve all 23 campuses, dramatically improving campus productivity.

Explore More: Get the complete guide to data masking methods and techniques >>

2. Enabled hybrid cloud strategy with migration to AWS

Pursuing a hybrid cloud approach typically involves slow, complex, and repeated transfer of data from on-prem to the cloud as well as concerns about the privacy of sensitive student information residing in the public cloud infrastructure. Delphix provided the ideal platform for data extraction from private to public cloud at large volumes and capacity. With Delphix, CSU is able to accelerate and simplify data migration and exchange to the hybrid cloud by having the ability to spin up, refresh, and tear down environments in both the private and in the public cloud for development and testing.

Data masking helped increase the security posture of the university by replacing sensitive fields (social security numbers, emails, credit card information, etc.) with fictitious yet realistic data in the virtual data copies, without affecting the usefulness for application development and testing in the cloud while staying compliant with mandates, such as HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, and CCPA. CSU no longer has to rely on the individual campus’ custom scripting, security policies, and practices for data masking.

3. $7.5M in development storage cost savings per year

The university system significantly reduced physical storage consumption while still allowing the campuses to clone data faster and having self-service capabilities along the way.

Summary: Deliver Compliant Data Fast, Like CSU

In partnership with Delphix and Unisys, this journey took CSU nearly 24 months from inception to completion. As a result, the university has achieved a more financially sustainable infrastructure while realizing significant cost savings, so it can create efficient and high-quality services that accelerates students’ success beyond their academic experience.

CSU has positioned itself at the tip of the digital spear with its overhaul of the student experience. This massive undertaking was only made possible through harnessing the underlying data encompassing all of their universities. Delphix played a critical part in enabling the necessary speed and security to make this transformation successful, and ultimately, spur positive outcomes that lead to higher graduation rates and an innovative campus experience to faculty and staff across the 23-campus system.

Full Video Transcript

CSU’s mission is to graduate students and have them contribute to the state of California in a way that is impactful.

Unisys works for them in support of data, whether that be data access, data delivery, data masking, or data integration.

At Cal State, you have a centralized entity responsible for executive and administrative responsibilities, but you have a federated environment of 23 universities and campuses that are all working together to achieve their outcomes. Software development was massive, but it was also very slow and very methodical, and it impacted productivity tremendously.

While the value realized was tremendous, the time to value was not very good. So it wasn’t just about creating better productivity. It wasn’t just about getting developers to do things faster. It wasn’t just about whether we could realize certain outcomes. It was about whether we could do all of those things at large volume and large scale. And Delphix was the only solution that would address all their business outcomes at large volumes and large scale.

We wanted to virtualize our databases quickly and save money. We saved about $7 million a year on an annual savings basis by leveraging the Delphix data virtualization platform.

Delphix has also evolved into privacy and compliance. The CMS holds Level 1 data for all 23 universities, almost nine million student records. That’s massive. So we deployed Delphix data masking, which helped ensure that the entire data set is masked and protected.

With Delphix and its APIs, we were able to integrate that into our core pipelines and give our developers much more agility and scalability, and give users a better experience.

The operational efficiencies realized with the level of productivity that we were delivering, which was Delphix-enabled, were basically a 99% improvement.

The other piece that’s become more prevalent now is saving us inefficiencies as we continue our cloud transformation. Some of the capabilities behind Delphix let us address not only speed but also the performance of that environment, dramatically affecting the cost of supporting the systems and workloads that are Delphix-enabled in the cloud.

All of those key activities have revolutionized how the development organization delivers its work. The work is being delivered at such a dramatically different level of timing and impact that not only has their productivity skyrocketed, but they’re also now thinking of new ways of doing things. The impact that we’ve had on just developer productivity alone is massive.

Similar Case Studies

• Delta Dental achieves a 20% faster AWS migration timeline.
• The University of Manchester delivers virtual data in 40 minutes instead of 16 days.
• Sky Italia reduces infrastructure footprint by 90%+.

Ready to make data fast, trusted, and AI-ready? Explore what Delphix can do for your business.

Discover Delphix