Have You Refreshed Your Student System Strategy and Roadmap Lately? For colleges and universities, a Student Information System (SIS) is more than just software—it is the lifeblood of campus operations. The SIS drives essential processes throughout the student...
Blog
Laying the Path for the Future of Our Managed Services Business: How and Why We Moved Out of Our Data Center to AWS
RAMP: 30 Clients in 15 Months All of Sierra-Cedar's hosted clients have now successfully migrated to AWS. It is with immense pride that I share the outstanding achievements of our recent Rapid AWS Migration Project (RAMP) and provide an overview of why we chose to...
Cleanse, Transform, and Enrich Data for Successful SaaS Deployments
Deploying SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) invariably involves converting data from existing systems into new applications. While data conversion presents an opportunity to preserve historical information for reporting and transactional processing within the new SaaS...
How to Solve the 4 Key Challenges for PeopleSoft Customers Moving to SaaS Deployment
SaaS (Software as a Service) has become an essential part of the digital business landscape. By placing software applications in the cloud, organizations can increase efficiency, reduce costs, and benefit from improved functionality as well as anytime, anywhere...
Navigating the 2024-2025 FAFSA Simplification: Essential Insights for Colleges
Welcome to our educational blog! Today, we're diving into the significant updates slated for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in the 24-25 Aid Year. These changes, a result of the Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA), represent a major shift from...
Should States Require Completion of the FAFSA for High School Seniors? A Positive Outcome in Alabama
While I have participated in many great technology projects throughout my career, our recent project with the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) was the most impactful and personally gratifying. This project helped to ensure that all students were given the...
AWS Account Factory for Terraform vs. AWS Landing Zone Accelerator
If your organization is setting up a multi-account AWS environment, your first step is to design and configure your base environment. As part of that process, you will face many decisions about what tools and services will enable you to establish the foundation for...
3 Ways DevOps Helps Achieve Cost Control at Scale
The trend toward cloud transformation continues to build momentum as more companies move their workloads to the cloud in pursuit of increased efficiency, agility, and reduced risk. Gartner forecasts that global spending on public cloud services will grow 20.7% to...
Infrastructure-as-Code Tools: How to Scale Up Your Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform
If you’re deploying public cloud infrastructure at scale in your organization, you’ve likely encountered challenges when addressing issues such as security, policy governance, drift control, and operational efficiency. How do you support infrastructure deployments for...
Sierra-Cedar’s Customer Journey With Scalr
Sierra-Cedar’s DevOps Services division assists clients in planning, implementing, migrating, and managing Infrastructure-as-Code in AWS and other major cloud service providers. Sierra-Cedar provides a wide range of services from the design and architecture of new...
Sierra-Cedar Debut of On Cloud 9 Conversations Featuring CFO of Wichita Public Schools
Last month Sierra-Cedar launched a video program called, On Cloud 9 Conversations. The broadcast is meant to give a candid view into the Cloud journey of a Sierra-Cedar customer by having the client respond to nine interview questions. The featured client in our debut...
Six Higher Education Institutions Make Strides with Oracle Student Financial Planning
Despite facing daunting challenges over the past 18 months, our friends in higher education continue to strive for improvement. They aim to provide students with high visibility into their programs, and they aspire for students and their families to have real-time...
Four Customers Who Said, “Goodbye Data Center, Hello AWS”
Saying ‘goodbye’ to your data center and moving to the Cloud is a big deal. It is like allowing someone else to take care of your car – you own it, you drive it, but someone else cleans it, maintains it, and powers it! The hardest part of moving your data to the Cloud...
Preparing for a SaaS Cloud Transition
Are you running on-premise back-office applications such as PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite, Lawson, JD Edwards, etc.? Are you looking for a strategy to move to a SaaS (Software-as a-Service) applications such as Oracle Cloud? Building trust into a cloud concept is not...
How Optimizing PeopleSoft Can Support Your Institution’s Strategic Direction
Higher Education IT leaders know they need to innovate. I know because I felt the constant need to support and improve systems of engagement as an IT leader for a public university system with an enrollment of more than 70,000 students. The struggle is real! Strategic...
Realizing the Beauty of PeopleSoft’s Fluid User Interface
When PeopleSoft was born, the cell phone was a telephone the size of a brick, and PeopleSoft was manually installed on individual PCs. Fast forward a couple of decades, a cell phone is called a smartphone, a smartphone is so slim it fits into a pocket, and PeopleSoft...
Preparing for the Cloud – Clean, Re-organize, and Own Your Data!
If this pandemic has done anything, it has given the gift of time! Time to catch up with old friends, binge watch Netflix shows, and tackle the most mundane projects … like reviewing and cleaning your system data. The thought of cleaning your data may have you...
Announcing Sierra-Cedar’s PeopleSoft Testing Framework (PTF) Workbench
End user testing … a critical step in any system update or release, yet this activity is notoriously painful! Testing needs data, scripts, and tracking; and it is a prime candidate for automation. Yet automating testing is tricky and time-consuming. A few years ago,...
Ease M&A Pain with Sierra-Cedar’s PeopleSoft System Readiness Assessment
Have you ever tried to put together a blank puzzle? Like one with 5,000 pieces and no image to guide you? While you may be up for the challenge, the puzzle may be a brutal experience without a clear picture of the result. Navigating a Merger and Acquisition (M&A)...
Oracle Cloud Module Spotlight: Procurement Contracts Cloud
Need to stay on your existing PeopleSoft system but want to try out the cloud? Look no further than Oracle Procurement Contracts Cloud. Why? It provides an easy way to transition to the cloud while maintaining your current PeopleSoft applications. Here is how it works...