The Institute significantly increased its investment in information technologies to accommodate the escalating requirements of student practicum projects in the Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) degree program. The practicum consists of teams of 4-5 students working on a challenging business problem with actual data from a sponsoring organization. Current projects typically involve 100’s of megabytes to 10’s of gigabytes of raw data—though the amount of data grows with each year. The new investments, which are made possible through the University’s Educational Technology Fund, include:
- Quadrupling the amount of RAM on servers for each team from 3.5 to 12 gigabytes.
- Increasing the Institute’s data storage capacity for practicum projects to 22 terabytes.
- Increasing concurrent users on blades from 2 to 5 users.
- Implementation of PGP Netshare for data encryption.