Education

More than college degrees

DSU is anything but an isolated academic bubble.

In addition to offering undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, the university plays an active role in creating jobs and employment opportunities for its students—boasting a 99.7% placement rate for its latest graduating class—and the community at large. It is building new, cutting-edge facilities for applied research and innovation. And it is redefining government and corporate partnerships, developing connections and programs that enable public and private entities to combine resources and work together in new, impactful ways.

What’s more, these efforts are largely centered on the future of technology.

“We’re a cyber university,” says Shawn Jaacks, CIO of DSU. “We have a dedicated focus on AI, quantum computing, and cybersecurity. Not just in our curriculum, but also in our research and partner initiatives.”

A powerhouse of the plains

Although DSU’s technology-centric mission was established in 1984, it was spurred in 2015 when Dr. José-Marie Griffiths became the university’s president and turned a “little college on the prairie” into a “cyber powerhouse of the plains.”

Under her visionary and dynamic leadership, DSU established The Beacom Institute of Technology in 2017. It created the Madison Cyber Labs in 2019. And it is preparing to expand its Applied Research Lab to support more than 400 full-time jobs and become a national resource for private and public cybersecurity contractors.

“We created a vision to expand DSU’s Applied Research Lab to stimulate a vibrant cyber-research industry in Sioux Falls that supports national security and defense, offers workforce and economic development opportunities, and establishes South Dakota as a cyber state,” says Dr. Griffiths, who has been listed among the 50 most influential women in AI, inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame, and named USA Today’s South Dakota Woman of the Year. “But we didn’t stop there. Through public and private partnerships, we’re advancing and accelerating our cyber-research efforts.”

To do so, DSU must have the most advanced, resilient, and secure technologies—not only in its data centers, but also in the hands of its faculty, students, and partners.

“Resource limitations can lead state institutions to prioritize price over other factors when making technology decisions,” says Shawn Jaacks, who was hired as CIO in 2022 to lead a sweeping technology transformation at DSU. “We have found, however, that standardizing on best-of-breed solutions provides performance improvements, management efficiencies, and, in many cases, cost reductions. Selecting Cisco as our full-stack standard is the right decision for our university on many levels.”

As a key step of DSU’s ongoing IT transformation, Jaacks decided to replace a multivendor collection of server clusters with Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System. Featuring 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors, the powerful platform supports 40% more virtual machines (VMs) per server than the university’s legacy systems. And hundreds of servers can be easily managed by a single individual with Cisco Intersight.

“We used to have multiple people racking and stacking servers, but we’ve been able to shift some of those resources to more strategic, higher-value projects,” Jaacks notes. “Intersight gives us a single pane of glass to manage configurations, firmware updates, and policies across multiple environments, which has accelerated our deployments and day-to-day operations.”

With a single, standardized computing infrastructure now in place, DSU is in the process of establishing a secure, multitenant network and DC fabrics with Cisco ACI and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches.

“Our long-term goal is standardization and integration of multiple networks and compute environments, creating a single fabric that increases efficiencies, resource availability, and resiliency,” Jaacks says. “With the micro segmentation capabilities of ACI, we can isolate and protect all of our user groups and workloads. And we plan to use the entire Cisco security stack to provide better threat detection, automation, and response.”

Frontline research and innovation

As he continues to transform DSU’s IT infrastructure, Jaacks says the newly deployed Cisco solutions are already being used for frontline research and innovation.

“We do not want our Cisco technologies to be in the background,” he explains. “These are world-class solutions, and we want our students, faculty, and partners to have access to all of them.”

Each student will eventually get their own virtual sandbox environment on a Cisco server for hands-on learning, testing, and engineering. More universities, government agencies, and industry partners will have secure access to DSU’s cyber ranges. And the research and innovation behind the next wave of AI, quantum computing, and cybersecurity will continue to expand beyond the traditional confines of academia.

“In higher education, we’re always looking at what’s coming next, and we have to be one step ahead of emerging trends,” says President Griffiths. “Exposing our students to the most advanced technologies is essential. And they love it!”