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A proliferation of rich data is of little use if it is scattered across desktops, schools, campuses, and formats, especially if you can’t easily retrieve or consolidate it. To drive business results, you need to analyze diverse information sets—regardless of where they originate.

Fortunately, there’s a more straightforward solution for containing data proliferation and for resolving other information management challenges that education institutions typically face. Consolidating information in a data warehouse based on the Microsoft data platform helps academic institutions to:

• Manage information in its many forms (documents, imagery, video, sensor data, and more).
• Access information—where it’s useful (from desktops to mobile devices).
• Share information with the people who need it (both within and across organizations).
• Secure information for different uses (in day-to-day and net-centric operations).

The Microsoft data platform provides a complete solution for storing, managing, and governing data, along with a rich set of services for interacting with information, including search, queries, data analysis, reporting, integration, and synchronization. With the solution in place, academic institutions can find information, make it available as insight, and use it to support decision-making and operations, thanks to core capabilities that include:

• Highly scalable data warehousing that can support thousands of users across terabytes of data. Built-in compression, transparent table partitioning, and query optimization help reduce response time and accelerate performance. You can use change tables to incorporate information more quickly and easily into data warehouses.
• Policy-based manageability to help reduce overhead and total cost of ownership, along with a new declarative framework for managing compliance, changes, and administrative tasks. Administrators can institute and monitor policy compliance with automated enforcement, event notification, and scheduled evaluations.
• Occasionally connected systems to support remote workers and mobile devices with unified synchronization across applications, data stores, and data types. The solution supports change-tracking, so agencies can develop robust, occasionally connected applications with minimal performance overhead.
• Streamlined development to provide a rich environment that supports the entire testing, development, and installation cycle. Business entities that can be queried with any .NET language provide easier access to data. Developers can work with a logical entity model and then define physical implementations as columns and tables.
• Security to transparently encrypt entire databases, data files, and log files without affecting applications. The solution provides advanced auditing capabilities and helps minimize vulnerabilities by enabling only needed features and functions according to policy-based configurations.
• Continuity of operations and disaster recovery to increase reliability and simplify recovery with seamlessly mirroring applications, databases, and Web services. The solution transfers operational data automatically between active and backup systems and allows administrators to add system resources without disruption.

The Microsoft Data Platform and SQL Server 2008 provide the technologies that academic institutions need to contain proliferation, manage data in all its divergent forms, and make information easy to access and use. Microsoft and your partners will help you determine the capabilities you need and can work with you through every step of development and installation.